You first may be asking: what qualifies me as a Yellow Page expert? I worked as an advertising consultant for a Bell System division for nearly 25 years. During that time, I counseled about 3000 businesses in advertising design, marketing programs, and promotional campaigns. I was a top performer for about half that time and won numerous awards and honors. With that background, let me discuss the unique media known as directory advertising.

In my market, we had about 80,000 businesses represented in the local city Yellow Pages. That’s a large sector of companies fairly reliant on a single product used by over 80% of the population. The Yellow Pages is a reliable constant that is relatively unchanged since its inception over 100 years ago. Back then, it was a list of companies and their ads, bound together in book form, and sent for free to every resident with a phone. Today, it serves the same function: a current resource for business information.

The only difference is the addition of full-color and the replication on the Internet. Otherwise, it’s your father’s Yellow Pages. It began as a byproduct of the phone company’s need to get the their subscribers’ phone numbers out to the general public. Then someone realized the value of actual ads that would offer additional facts such as hours, products, services, and locations. Presently, many businesses rely on their Yellow Page ads, exclusively.