I Am Curious Yellow

First, if you understand the headline of this blog post, I know how old you are. Or what a pervert you are. Or both.

But I digress, and I haven't even started yet. I have written in the past about the Yellow Pages as an incredibly expensive and inefficient advertising vehicle for attorneys, and an outmoded communication vehicle, not to mention an environmental faux pas. 

 And yet, within the past week or so, we have taken delivery in my office of three Yellow Books, two Verizon phone directories, six from Embarq, and one slightly smaller one from Ogden Publications (EZtoUseBlueBook.com) complete with a magnet stuck to the cover and a little logo with a green leaf and the text "Eco-Friendly Size."

If you're still with me, that's 12 directories for one office. My building has a dozen or so offices in it. Many of them are closed for the holidays, and so I can see, outside each door in the hallway, a stack of telephone directories.

I talked to one of my clients about it. He has ads in the yellow pages of two different phone directories, and hates it. Says he doesn't get anything like his money's worth from the ads, and that he's much rather use that money on other marketing methods. So why doesn't he? "I'm not sure," he says. "I guess I'm afraid not to be in there, when all the other lawyers are. One day soon the phone directories will die and I, for one, will be happy not to have to pay them any longer." 

Comments

[Eleanor Sommer]

Yeah! I couldn't agree more. All the ads look the same, and how many people actually choose an attorney by flipping through the phone book?

The latest fad in some areas is selling rectangular magnets inside the shrink wrap of the phone book packaging. So every year we receive the same magnet from the same attorney. So how many magnets of this guy's mug do we actually need staring at us form our refrigerator? (Perhaps he has been advised that phone books are going to a certain percentage of new residents. Oops! Florida is actually losing population so there goes that theory.)

But wait, I have found a use for the magnets--art projects with patients in the hospital. The magnets are cut up into pieces and patients can glue stuff to them making decorative refrigerator magnets.

A fun time is had by all. The medium remains. The message disappears.