Marketing: the Yellow Pages Run for Color

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Each year about 173 million Americans thumb through one or another of the 6,400 local editions of the Yellow Pages, looking for hardware stores or Hungarian restaurants. Some customers who recently received new directories noticed something startling about their Yellow Pages: they were not just yellow anymore. In fact, they were filled with splashes of red, brown and even green. For the first time since people began letting their fingers do the walking 100 years ago, multicolor advertisements are being printed in the Yellow Pages. These eye-catching ads, first introduced last November in the Champaign, Ill., phone book, now appear in ten markets, including Orlando, Cincinnati, and Springfield, Ill.

Though it has of course long been possible to print color ads in the Yellow Pages, publishers of the directories chose not to do so because of the expense. Now, however, a new, patented graphics process called Markolor will reduce the cost of such ads in the Yellow Pages by half. R.H. Donnelley, the Purchase, N.Y.-based publisher or sales agent for 600 different Yellow Pages directories, owns the exclusive rights to Markolor. The company plans to have color on all its Yellow Pages by 1987.