The plop of phone books dropped at front doors across Chattanooga last week was a little softer than normal.
The AT&T Yellow Pages directory shipped without residential phone listings for the first time in Chattanooga this year, a money-saving trend offering customers choices - a full print directory with residential numbers may still be ordered at no charge - and slashing paper and ink consumption.
Yellow Book, a competitor to the AT&T Yellow Pages in the area, already publishes without residential white pages. The Yellow Book directory, which comes out in November, recently shrank from a four-column to a proportionately smaller three-column format, said company spokeswoman Maria Mitchell.
FRACTURED MARKET
As more telephone users migrate to unlisted mobile numbers, residential listings have become incomplete and, without cell phone listings, less relevant, according to Negley Norton, president of Local Search Association, the former Yellow Pages Association. The same can't be said for the business directory or Yellow Page section, which often remain tied to land lines in office spaces.
"We save a few bucks and don't irritate the customer," Norton said. "Why not just save the money?"
The lessening demand for residential listings doesn't indicate a strong decline in relevance of Yellow Page advertising. Fewer consumers may use their phone books to look up telephone numbers, but Yellow Page companies insist more consumers are using their websites to find numbers on their computers or smart phones.
In other markets where AT&T has rolled out the slimmer phone book, only 5 percent of customers have requested the full book of residential listings.
USE DEFENDED
"Yellow Pages are still very highly used. It's still the premiere, primary way that businesses connect," said Bob Mueller, executive director of business operations at AT&T Advertising Solutions. "It's a transition from print to multimedia, and included in that multimedia mix is print."
Mueller said 78 percent of adult consumers say they use print directories to look up businesses. The new AT&T directory, with a 309,000 copy distribution compared to Yellow Book's 190,000 distribution, has 88 percent usage share in the Chattanooga area, he said.
Yellow Page use has been declining nationally, dropping from an estimated 12 billion print lookups in 2009 to 11 billion in 2010, according to Norton. But with those billions of impressions, the book remains an important advertising space.
"It has come down, but we're seeing growth in all the other parts of the business," Norton said. "There's just a lot of other places users can go to find that information."
Yellow Page businesses have expanded their advertising offerings largely to deal with that industry shift. Web design, hosting, online directory service and search engine optimization have all become key services offered by Yellow Page printers.
"It's a changing world, and I think our companies are going through the process to evolve," Norton said. "It's really becoming much more of a media-agnostic business than it was in the past. Now it's, 'Let's help that local plumber get leads from a variety of sources.'"
LAWYERS HAWK SERVICES
Still, print advertising is an important part of the business. According to Mueller, about 75 percent of AT&T Advertising Solutions' revenue comes from print.
Local bankruptcy lawyer Eron Epstein said he has a comprehensive advertising strategy, with his business appearing online, on TV, on radio and in the Yellow Pages. He spends about half his advertising budget on print advertising and his name can be found throughout the phone book.
"If I didn't think it was worth doing, I wouldn't do it, but it's my least favorite way to spend marketing dollars at this point," he said. "I just think at the end of the day, comprehensive just means what it means - everywhere you can be."
Among lawyers, Epstein is not alone. Attorney advertisements comprise the biggest section of the Yellow Pages with 45 pages of ads in the new AT&T book.
Mueller said the Yellow Pages allow advertisers to track how many calls businesses receive from each source through different phone numbers in the phone book and online. Online advertising generates about 13 calls each month, while Yellow Page ads draw 18.
"People still get more calls from print," he said. "To think that nobody's using the Yellow Pages - that's just not true."