Yellow Pages 90 Percent Discount, Really?

Just a quick post to show you how the beginning of the year is going for the Yellow Page print business. So far in the first half of January I have had 3 customers tell me they have pulled their complete PRINT Yellow Page budget and a few more tell me that if they were in multiple Yellow Page (i.e. Yellowbook, etc) they have brought it down to one.

Well, today one of our really great customers came by to tell us something a bit interesting and I am sure if any of you have current Yellow Page spend and have not committed one way or the other for this years budget you will have happening soon, he got a call from his account manager stating they are offering a 90 PERCENT DISCOUNT for this year if he commits now.

He still said no.

I am not sure what different regions are being offered this type of discount or what level of customer, but WOW.  Aggressive.

Do you have any similar stories?

Yellowpages Marketing Ripoff

I am sure the Yellowpages has been doing this for years but I wanted to warn small business owners as they open their mail in the next few days as I had two other people mention this to me today unsolicited.

I have no idea if this is being done because they are desperate to sell paper print ads or if it is something they have always done or if it is something new they are trying for another reason  but as a person who sells advertising to companies I took major offense to the way that the Yellowpages sent their mailing asking for payment on an "order" I had made. Now keep in mind I have had the Yellowbook people visit but never the Yellowpages and have done posts about the Yellowbook visit. But in this case, and I threw it away or I would post it verbatim, the Yellowpages sent a mailing out too, as far as I can tell, all businesses in the area and I am sure a much larger area than that, asking for payment for an ad order I had placed....Ummm never placed.....

Well guess what, there was no order, by any of the other people I talked to either. Now from the marketing side I can see what they are trying accomplish, I am not naive and I do understand the value in positioning a letter to make it sound like the customer must sign and act. I get it!!!

But also, the goodwill that gets dimished by positioning like this, basically by either a) feeding on a customers lack of knowledge of marketing techniques, or b) a customers lack of time to read through what was sent, is just sickening to me.

The first person that mentioned this to me today is a very smart businessman, a long term restaurant owner who has seen it all and he almost signed it and sent it back, in effect agreeing to an order he never placed but he would of been held responsible for. Why, because he was busy and did not have the time to review it in detail, luckily he had sat it aside and decided to review it later.

After he read it he figured it out quickly that the letter was basically saying that buying send this you are agreeing, etc but in reality no order had been placed. Imagine how many people actually sign this and just send it back because they do not understand the way this scam is setup. And I do consider it just that, a scam. It preys on those that do not have the time or understanding of what is being pulled over on them. Sure I know these people should be responsible enough to watch the contracts and orders their business signs but when something like this is received from an authoritative company many small shops will sign and move on. It just is what it is.

Well, it sucks, it is wrong, and I can tell you as more people realize that the amount of print Yellowpages being actually used is dropping at a faster rate everyday people will stand for it less.

If you want to quit receiving the Yellowpages visit YellowPagesGoesGreen.org. I do not get paid for anything on that site but did help them with some of the marketing for it, to tell you the level of interest by people to know longer receive the print Yellowpages they had 165,000 sign ups in one year with ZERO paid advertising....

Yellowbook Positioning Failure

One of the interesting things about running my own business and actually having a physical office presence is having people come in and try to sell me things, most of them do not make it past my operations guy extraordinaire who does a great job of filtering people asking for something. Recently we had 2 different "Yellowpage" companies coming through on successive days. Although one of them figured out pretty quick what we did as a company and did not work to hard to sell us the Yellowbook people actually scheduled a time to come back. I actually thought this would be an interesting conversation to see how they positioned their product and how they were dealing with the rapid decline of usage of the print yellowpage phonebooks.

As most domain investors know local search is a very fast growing sector of search engine usage. It is pretty obvious that a good portion of the people using local search either through their PC/laptop or mobile phones are the same people no longer using their print phone books. Knowing all this I was truly interested to hear how the sales people from an industry with their current challenges would position around this.

After getting over the initial laughing at the fact I am basically a competitor in some facets, they started to discuss their story. One of the first things I noticed was the conflicting story they were giving. Basically they were telling me the print side was not dying but in the next sentence they would talk about how they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars marketing their web based directory and services.  As a buyer the first thing that I would be concerned about, even if I was not in this industry, is that you are trying to get me to spend the majority of my dollars with you on a product that you are not promoting yourselves.

The next thing, after getting to know the people a bit better is learning that the "junior" person in the room was actually the person that knows "new media" and is their to support the "senior" person. In otherwords they have figured out that customers are getting more savvy about their online marketing spend and social networking usage and they have a "sales engineer" type person to help support the legacy account managers (can I say old school account managers). From talking to them this is a fairly new model for them. I think its great for them that they get the shift but when they are spending 80 percent of their time focused on selling the old school print phonebook ad and then telling me they have invested in resources (people) and marketing to drive their online business it tells me they still do not quite have it right.

Now, I must say I do have a bit of history and even before starting an online media company I was more than a little bias against print Yellowpage/Yellowbook delivery. I had worked with the people at Big River Telephone in the past as they helped their President's son launch YellowPagesGoesGreen.org. The site focused on allowing people to submit their information so that they no longer received the print Yellowpages from their area, local edition or the big players. I had helped them with their grassroots marketing efforts and was pleased when after less than a year the site had 147,000 sign ups and had been featured in Readers Digest, LifeHacker.com, along with many others. Oh yeah all with NO paid advertising.

A last little side note to the story, I recently heard from 2 different customer prospects that the one of the local yellowbook sales people are telling them that Missouri.me is advertising in yellowbook to get all their traffic. Well, that is funny for a couple reasons 1) We have spent zero dollars with either major Yellowpage company and 2) Are they that afraid that a new company in the area could hurt them that they have to try to bash us.

In reality they have an online ad package that would be interesting to us. Is it wrong to advertise your business even if you are in advertising. Hmmmm. I am pretty sure they talked about spending hundreds of million advertising their online presence. I did call the online media specialist on the their team and called them out on it. He was to do some "research" and I  look forward to hearing what he comes back with. I guess its a compliment, looks like they are paying attention to a new upstart in the area.