In recent years, and around the same time, an annual copy of the Yellow Pages has crept into my mailbox. The specimen is each year thinner and less showy and each and every one of the years that has left me I have been surprised first and then I have thought about analyzing its still existence in an article.

I've never actually done the latter. I have always uploaded the copy to my house, with a certain respect for the work of printing and distributing (many of my neighbors, as they do with catalogs and other direct marketing elements, have been throwing them away in the bin next to the mailboxes, in an unsurprising move).

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

From being the immense volumes that they were then (the White ones have not reached the houses for a long time), they have first become those small pocket 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 - falling before modernity and web searches.

BeeDIGITAL, the company that publishes 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 closes on paper and will only be available online.

"For years we have been experiencing a deep digitization of our economy, which has forced us to transform our solutions and processes with some urgency, at the same time that it has opened up new opportunities," explained the CEO of the company after the announcement to Xataka , Javier Castro.

The decline of the catalog
The end of the paper edition of the Yellow Pages has served for a wave 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 irregular luck of the paper formats for direct marketing. The closure of Círculo de Lectores in 2019, for example, evidenced the decline of catalog sales .

And despite the still-seemingly unquestionable reign of Christmas toy catalogs and the fact that Best Database Provider companies have reclaimed the catalog as an object of desire, the catalog in general is in a tough spot. In December, Ikea announced the death of its famous catalog . Despite its circulation of 40 million copies (which was what the last one registered) and despite the fact that it is in a certain way an element-event, Ikea has recognized that its consumers have moved to the network and that "the interest in the catalog 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 before and has now turned its catalog into a podcast. Catalog 2021 is a four-hour podcast. The narrator herself jokes in the audio with the reasons why it occurred to them to do something similar. You have run out of audiobooks and podcasts of those of the best of 2020 to listen to, he says, so here is an alternative.

An alternative and innovative format
And, in the end, what all these movements say is that the Buy Mobile Database consumer has grown tired of the traditional direct marketing formats, or at least the old versions of them. Filling the mailbox with pamphlets and messages that do not add much does not make sense (if my neighbors are worth as market study, everything ends up in a bin strategically located next to the mailboxes).

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