Yellow scaling back phone book delivery
The Yellow and White Pages won’t be delivered to apartment units in Auckland unless people ask for them, if a trial in Wellington proves popular.
The partial step towards an ‘‘opt-in’’ system for the directories could later be extended to office buildings and follows a decision by Yellow to axe 10 of its local editions.
But Yellow’s interim chief executive Darren Linton said the company’s business plan was to return to revenue and profit growth within three years, as its digital business grew and new services came on stream.
Printed directories accounted for 60 per cent of its sales – or $56 million – in the year to June.
But Linton forecast that would drop to 25 per cent within three years.
In another sign of the way traditional advertising has been turned on its head by the internet, burger company Wendy’s announced it was buying space on ’’virtual’’ billboards, bus shelters and TV screens that appear in computer games.
Digital ‘‘real world’’ adverts for Wendy’s Baconater bacon hamburgers will appear in Xbox, PlayStation 4 and Steam games from Monday, in what the company believed was a first for a New Zealand brand.
Wendy’s NZ chief executive Danielle Lendich said gamers fit into its target market and this was a new way to get its message to a hard-to-reach audience.
Yellow’s revenues slipped slightly to just under $95m in the year to the end of June, Linton said, down from $158m in its last publicly reported result, which was for the year to June 2014.
All versions of the Yellow Pages are now combined with the White Pages in a single directory.
Linton said when the next edition was published in Wellington in late October, Yellow would deliver leaflets or cards to apartment units informing residents they could go to its website to order a print copy if they still wanted one.
‘‘The thinking is there are a higher proportion of people in apartments in the cities who are younger and more likely to want to use a digital solution.’’
Yellow would also make it simpler for anyone to ‘‘opt-out’’ of receiving a directory from September, by reducing the steps involved.
A new initiative, Yellow Move, helps people update their address with all their utility providers.