What the end of the Yellow Pages or the birth of the Ikea podcast catalogue say about how direct marketing has changed

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Over the past few years, and around the same time, an annual copy of the Yellow Pages has been slipping through my mailbox. The copy is getting thinner and less attractive each year, and each and every year that it has been left for me, I have first been surprised and then thought about analyzing its continued existence in an article.

I've never actually done the latter. I've always brought the copy up to my house, with a certain respect for the work of printing and distributing it (many of my neighbours, as they do with catalogues and other direct marketing items, have been throwing them into the bin next to their letterboxes, in a move that is hardly surprising).

The Yellow Pages tend to hang around on the surface of a couple of pieces of furniture for a couple of months, until they end up in a recycling bag on a deep cleaning day. Nothing to do with the almost reverence that I felt the Yellow and White Pages had when I was little and they were, in a not so distant past, the gateway to finding everything from a neighbor's phone number to the plumber's.

From being the huge volumes they were back then (the Blancas have not been available in homes for a long time), they have gradually become pocket-sized volumes and have finally disappeared. The Yellow Pages have become the last relic of the past - and one of the last classic elements of direct marketing - which falls to the face of modernity and online searches.

BeeDIGITAL, the company responsible for publishing the Yellow Pages, has just announced that the next edition of the guide will also be the last. After half a century of publication, the directory is closing in print and will only be available online.

"For years we have been experiencing a profound digitalisation of our all contact number list economy, which has forced us to transform our solutions and processes with a certain urgency, while opening up new opportunities for us," the company's CEO, Javier Castro, explained to Xataka after the announcement .

The twilight of the catalogue
The end of the paper edition of the Yellow Pages has served as a source of nostalgia in a couple of articles and columns in the media, but it is, in the end, one more example of how things have changed and the uneven luck of paper formats for direct marketing. The closure of Círculo de Lectores in 2019, for example, showed the decline of catalogue sales .


And, despite the seemingly unchallengeable reign of Christmas toy catalogues and the fact that some companies have recovered the catalogue as an object of desire, the catalogue in general is in a difficult situation. In December, Ikea announced the death of its famous catalogue . Despite its circulation of 40 million copies (which was what the last one recorded) and despite the fact that it is in some ways an event-item, Ikea has acknowledged that its consumers have moved to the Internet and that "interest in the catalogue has fallen."


This is not to say that Ikea is not proactive in showing its products to its customers. The web and digital marketing tools now occupy those positions and Ikea itself is experimenting with formats.

It was one of the companies that used augmented reality first and has now turned its catalogue into a podcast. The 2021 catalogue is a four-hour podcast. The narrator herself jokes in the audio about the reasons why they thought of doing something like this. You've run out of audiobooks and podcasts of the best of 2020 to listen to, she tells us, so here's an alternative.

An alternative and innovative format
And, in the end, what all these movements say is that the consumer has grown tired of traditional direct marketing formats, or at least of the same old versions of them. Filling the mailbox with pamphlets and messages that do not contribute much is pointless (if my neighbors are anything to go by, it all ends up in a strategically placed trash can next to the mailboxes).

Consumers are already overwhelmed by advertising impacts and do not want anything more than the usual. They are looking for surprising and innovative formats, elements that allow them to get to know brands and their products in a new and memorable way.