Marketing Speaker Proclaims Historical First… The Death of a Medium
This is the first obituary I’ve ever written. I’m reporting on the death of an advertising medium.
Granted, I’m a bit premature. The patient is technically still alive, but in a coma. The ailment is terminal. Death will come too slowly for some, too soon for others, but it will come.
I refer to the eminent doom of the YELLOW PAGES.
I’m saying it’s game over. Stick a fork in ‘em. They’re done.
I haven’t used them for years. And neither have the people I talk to regularly. Recently, I’ve begun asking random people I run into out in public. They’re not using the Yellow Pages either.
All of this is just anecdotal, of course. Still, I’m not the first one to suggest the demise of the yellow pages. I may be the first to say it’s a done deal NOW.
Do a Google search on “decline of yellow page usage” or anything like it. I got 30,500 items.
You can quote Bill Gates himself in a 2007 article from the Seattle Sun Times (Which, ironically, has itself stopped hard copy publishing since the Gates article, and is now strictly an online publictation. Something else Gates predicted for the newspaper world.)
“The traditional Yellow Pages are doomed, as voice-activated Internet searches combined with on-screen interfaces on smart mobile devices get better and proliferate.
“When you say something like ‘plumber’the presentation you get will be far better than what you get in the Yellow Pages,” Gates said. “After all, we know your location and so we can cluster [results] around that. … Yellow Page usage amongst people in their, say below 50, will drop to near zero over the next five years.”
Another 2007 online article by Chris Silver Smith predicts that the Yellow Pages will be “toast” in four years. But that was going on three years ago now. Said he, “Local marketing industry savants have long been predicting the demise of print Yellow Pages books, going the way of the buggy whip due to overwhelming competition from Internet alternatives. Further, the aggressive invasion of search engines into the local space during the past few years has inspired some analysts to wonder if Internet Yellow Pages directories might also be headed for extinction along with the printed books.”
Yes, I occasionally use dexknows.com, for example, but not as often as I once did. Not necessary anymore, when a direct Google search gets me the same or better information, more directly.
And then there is the more militant position reflected in the headline of a post from Killian and Company…
“Why Are the Yellow Pages like Nursing Homes?
They’re shockingly expensive, few people under 70 use them,
and many who do are just a little out of it.”
The cynicism may be justifiable. For decades Yellow Page publishers and their armies of sales reps have been pillaging the business landscape. (Hence my earlier statement that for some the death of this medium is too slow in coming.) They have sucked as much money as possible out of every business possible, large or small, regardless of whether the ads were in the best interest of the company paying the bill or not.
In the plumbing and heating category as just one example, I have known companies to take out as many as six full pages. That’s three double trucks! The cost can be upwards of 50 or 60 THOUSAND dollars a month in some markets. And it’s not like they’re good ads. They’re the same ads the company used to put on a single full-page or a single double truck, but with the message spread over the six pages, maybe with bigger type.
Now the first such company to do something stupid like this may just be company greed. They do it to insure themselves first position in the book. But then the YP bloodsuckers start strong-arming everybody else in the category to pony up the same kind of money, so they can keep up with the Joneses.
Foolish of them to comply, yes. But you have to question the ethics of the Yellow Page companies and their salespeople.
Quoting again from the Killian piece…
“It’s an addiction, and fear of withdrawal is what keeps the Yellow Pages on life support. All the fear tactics of “combined rates” and “volume discounts” and implied threats to banish you to a “bad position” if advertisers reduce the size of ads miss the point: they are all bad positions – overpriced, underperforming, and outdated.”
As recently as six months ago, I wouldn’t have said what I am about to say…
Most companies should get out of the Yellow Pages and
redirect those marketing dollars to Search Engine Optimization.
You may elect to wean yourself from the YP habit slowly. And when I say that, I mean take two or three years to drop back to a minimal position, if you’ve occupied a major presence in the past. Get out of books that aren’t performing immediately and cut back in the others.
If you haven’t been a big YP player, by all means, don’t be afraid to quit cold turkey.
There’s a part of me that hates to see the Yellow Pages go. A part of me that hates to see the demise of any business, any ad medium. But there’s also the part that says it couldn’t happen to a better bunch.
Meanwhile, for those of us who must market on. Your prospects are still looking for you. But now they’re doing it online.
Please understand, I’m not reversing my earlier position that too many businesses spend too much time trying to make the Internet work. I’m merely acknowledging the reality that the search process that used to be the Yellow Pages has moved almost entirely online. So you have to be there if your business is search dependent. Get a website and get “a guy” – outsourced or in-house – to handle the SEO. And do it NOW!
THE END
EDITOR’S NOTE: Jim Ackerman is a Salt Lake City-based Marketing Coach, Marketing Speaker, Advertising Speaker, Sales Trainer, Business Columnist and Business Writer. His new book, How To Market Your Crap When the Economy is in the Toilet, contains 12 vital strategies for unclogging your revenue pipeline. Find it at www.marketyourcrap.com, where you can also register for a FREE 2-hour seminar by the same name. Or email mail@ascendmarketing.com for info on local search optimization.
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