So then I took my turn
Oh all the things I’ve done
And it was all yellow
I drew a line
I drew a line for you
Oh what a thing to do
And it was all yellow
Some of the lyrics to the wonderful Coldplay song, Yellow. Yellow’s turn in advertising however is changing dramatically….the yellow pages that is. The time when people looked forward to getting the new directory has long since passed. While still a $15 billion business, yellow page books have fast become nothing more than doorstops. I’ve seen many a high-rise building where yellow pages are dropped off in bundles and weeks later have only grown a dusty covering as people left to take them, choose not to. Why?
The answer to that is simple… Google, Yahoo, Bing and so on, have become the yellow pages of the 21st century. Our society has long been one of instant gratification…fast food, personal music channels, email and text notifications. We are no longer content to read yesterday’s news in today’s newspaper. How can anyone expect us to use last month’s phone directory…let alone last year’s?
The line has been drawn…the line has been crossed. We still want a phone number and an address, we just want it now. Add to that about 15% of us move in the course of a year, why wouldn’t we want the most up to date service available?
Yellow pages online seems to be doing ok…but when was the last time you heard the expression “I’m going to yellow page someone”? The yellow page experience online is little more than the yellow page experience in the printed books, albeit with a few links added (for those who pay). How did search engines take over this lucrative market? They gave it away. They listed everyone and linked to everyone…FREE. The online yellow pages may list many businesses for free, but they haven’t yet learned the lesson of the internet. $15 billion in yellow pages sales may sound like a lot, but Google took in $23 billion. That’s enough to make yellow green with envy.
