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It is official - the old fashioned phone book is officially obsolete. The internet is truly becoming the “new directory” of choice by consumers. However, don’t expect your local yellow page directory rep to break the news – according to their industry’s research, Overall Yellow Pages Usage Growing. “Yellow Pages — in Print and Online — Remains a Go-To Resource for Ready-to-Buy Consumers, Says Yellow Pages Association”
Ever see the movie “Thank You for Smoking”? In that movie, the main character – Nick Naylor- is the chief spokesperson and lobbyist for Big Tobacco. His official title is the Vice-President of the Academy of Tobacco Studies. The plot summary at IMDb.com for the movie reveals the core of the movie’s plot:
Tobacco industry lobbyist Nick Naylor has a seemingly impossible task: promoting cigarette smoking in a time when the health hazards of the activity have become too plain to ignore. Nick, however, revels in his job, using argument and twisted logic to place, as often as not, his clients in the positions of either altruistic do-gooders or victims.
In the movie, Robert Duvall plays the Captain – who remembers the day that Reader’s Digest finally “outed” tobacco as causing cancer. Prior to that time – tobacco companies were actually advertising their product as “healthy”. After that seminal moment, the job of the tobacco executive was to find a way to keep the money train rolling. Nick’s boss – BR – delivers this line in the movie:
People, what is going on out there? I look down this table, all I see are white flags. Our numbers are down all across the board. Teen smoking, our bread and butter, is falling like a shit from heaven! We don’t sell Tic Tacs for Christ’s sake. We sell cigarettes. And they’re cool and available and *addictive*. The job is almost done for us!
Your yellow page rep is facing a similar future – and a similar lecture from his/her superiors. The seminal moment for the Yellow Page directory was when Bill Gates made the predictiction about Yellow Page usage way back in 1997:
The Yellow Pages are going to be used less and less. When you go to this service that’s going to take our technology and Tellme technology that we acquired, when you say something like “plumber,” the presentation you get will be far better than something you get in the Yellow Pages. After all, we know your location, and so we can cluster around that. We can take the information and show you the names, and you can expand the information easily. These things always take time, but Yellow Page usage among people, say, below 50, will drop to zero — near zero — over the next five years.”
More than a decade later, Slate reporter Paul Collins asked “Why won’t phone books die?“ Within the article, he reveals the answer:
But, above all, phone books were the sine qua non of small-business advertising and such an unstoppable gusher of profit that by the time industry pioneer Reuben Donnelly died in 1929, he’d already built up a $10 million personal estate.
Just because cigarettes were no longer “healthy” didn’t mean Big Tobacco was going to quit selling them to consumers. The same is true of yellow page advertising.
Why are attorneys still relying upon the obsolete phone book for the lion’s share of their advertising?
The reason is simple: because like cigarettes – advertising in the yellow page is so easy it’s positively addictive.
Pick up any of your local yellow page directories and you’ll find them jam packed with thousands of businesses who still rely upon these relics from the past as their primary method of advertising.
Advertising is the phone book is literally “set it and forget it” marketing and advertising for attorneys. If you – as an attorney – would ever question whether your yellow page advertising was effective – you would be instructed to ask every caller HOW they found your practice. The twist here is – if the yellow pages are the ONLY place you’re advertising – then what other answer would you expect to get from prospective clients?
While traditional printed phone directories are obsolete – they will remain viable as long as long as the “pushers” of yellow page advertising are no longer able to get small business owners to support their yellow page advertising habit.
The problem- if you’re relying on your yellow page directory advertising to build your legal practice – you’re booking a room on the Titanic. The Yellow Pages are obsolete – and if you’ve noticed a drop in the number of prospective client calls your firm receives that’s probably the reason.
