Once-stodgy Yellow Pages now mark digital leading edge

July 15, 2001

BY MICHAEL KRAUSS

Gary Kubo is a veteran marketing researcher who’s always been good at spotting a trend. I’ve known Kubo since high school when we both were on the track team; he used to make fun of the fact that I couldn’t do deep knee bends. So when Kubo called the other day, I wasn’t sure if it was about jogging a couple of miles or some new stretch technology.

Turned out it was the latter.

“Yellow Pages,” he said. “You ought to speak with Dawn Ciers, president of Bozell’s Yellow Pages advertising unit in Morristown, N.J. They’re doing some great things with interactive technology.”

Yellow Pages—how boring. But there’s a lot I didn’t know.

I didn’t realize that, for example, Verizon’s online product, SuperPages.com, is both the online Yellow Pages for consumers and, on the business-to-business side, the directory for such Internet powerhouses as AOL, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Excite, Hotbot and InfoSeek. Or that SuperPages.com conducted more than 20 million searches a month and had more than 4.5 million unique visitors perusing content from 1.5 million small businesses. Not bad for folks who aren’t a portal and just do one thing—connect local buyers and sellers—really well.

I also wasn’t aware that electronic Yellow Pages services would soon offer buyers and sellers the opportunity to bid, and dynamically alter prices, in real time to move inventories of airline tickets, hotel rooms and rental cars. And in another take on the way technology is revolutionizing a familiar product, I didn’t know that Bozell’s Yellow Pages advertising unit was breaking new ground with Intranet technology to automate the advertising development and approval process.

Nor did I know the stodgy, traditional Yellow Pages in some parts of the country are leading theway in bridging the gap between physical print advertising and dynamic online content.

A conversation with Ciers and her pal, Pat Marshall, group vice president of marketing at Verizon Information Services in Dallas, showed that Yellow Pages are at the cutting edge. Bozell and Verizon, a couple of traditional companies, are in the hunt to deliver profitably on the promises popularized by the dot-com revolutionaries.

To see just how far the Yellow Pages have come, consider how a Texas version is using new technology to link physical place with virtual space.

Historically,Yellow Pages directories are static. They’re printed once a year and are out-of-date by the time they reach users. Based on that experience, experts understandably predicted that Yellow Pages directories were dinosaurs sure to be overtaken by online rivals.

Now, the story is different.

“I don’t think the Yellow Pages is going away,” says Marshall, a 23-year industry veteran. “Yellow Pages is used by 57% of all American households at least weekly, and that’s been steady since 1985. ... But I do think it’s going to morph.”

For example, Verizon recently launched a print versionof the Yellow Pages in Texas that incorporates CueCat technology, developed by Dallas-based Digital Convergence Inc. CueCat is a small, mouse-like, infrared scanner that attaches to a personal computer, reads bar codes on printed pages and instantly takes users deep into a Web site. There’s a little beep, your browser opens and you’re at just the right page.

As an illustration, say you own a pizza parlor in Arlington, Texas. You can put a bar code in your Yellow Pages ad offering monthly, weekly or even daily specials and then update your specials online at any time; customersscanthe bar code to be taken to the page featuring the specials. Or, you can post the menu to the Web site and update it daily while advertising annually in the Yellow Pages. Basically, CueCat makes it easier for a print user to get right to information online that’s most relevant.

CueCat links in Yellow Pages aren’t just for advertisers, Marshall points out.

“You might be taken to a Web page that has forms that you need to complete before visiting a medical professional,” he says.

I picked up a CueCat package and found it isn’t difficult to install. You load some softwareandconnect the CueCat to your computer through the keyboard connection. You have to e-mail Digital Convergence for a subscriber code, which is free of charge. Then you fiddle with a few settings, and you’re in business. (Who knows what they’ll do with my e-mail address, and the CueCat didn’t quite work on my laptop. But it worked fine with my home PC.)

I’m not sure I’d really take the time to scan a pizza ad in my local Yellow Pages; I might just call them and ask for their specials. But something about CueCat gives me goose bumps. I think it’s the technology’s role as the bridge between paper and computer, from print to PC, and the fact that it does it so rapidly.

Frankly, CueCat’s future is unclear. It had a rocky introduction a few years ago and was roundly criticized by many technology reviewers, but it recently was redesigned. Its parent company, Digital Convergence, got caught in the tech crash, was forced to shelve an IPO in the spring and in the middle of last month laid off most of its workforce. The idea, however, is exciting and points the way toward the future of online and offline content integration, whether that integration is provided by CueCat or another technology, by Digital Convergence or another company.

In the end, I’m glad Kubo called. It’s good to know interactive and traditional communications technologies are becoming increasingly elastic. I find it funny that with all the hype around dot-com Super Bowl ads, the Yellow Pages would be leading the way with these new stretch technologies. Maybe the technology revolution has legs after all.

Michael Krauss is a partner with DiamondCluster International in Chicago. He can be reached at news@ama.org.