Last week, Greg Sterling posted about small businesses’ resentment of newspapers and Yellow Pages

I made a presentation last week to a group of landscaping business owners about online marketing, and boy, was that resentment tangible.

My presentation was part of a marketing seminar hosted by Judy Guido. Right before I got up, she asked the participants about their experience with the Yellow Pages.

There were two things the group (50 or so people) had in common:

• YP reps would drive them to bigger and bigger ads year after year. The reps are not incented to deliver better service but to increase their ad spend. Participants told stories about getting setup into ad-wars with their competitors by the sales reps.
• Despite their relatively large ad spends, results were really poor. One participant got 7 leads all year from a whole-page ad.

I’m going to rephrase a bit. The two reasons YP sucks for small business is:

1. Arrogance: “everyone has to advertise with us”
2. Unaccountability: Can you imagine a scenario where a YP publisher would partner with someone like Voicestar and provide tracking numbers to all their advertisers? I can’t, although I’d love to be proved wrong.

Arrogance and unaccountability are systemic problems that won’t be solved without YP publishers risking cutting the neck of their golden goose.

The challenge for those of us providing new Sincere and Accountable advertising vehicles is something that YP mastered long ago:

• Simplicity. Companies like Leads.com, Marchex and Reach Local are heading in the right direction
• Visibility. Google & Yahoo are certainly getting there, but they fail miserably on the Simplicity front.

Greg, I don’t have any hard numbers for you, but the 50 people in the seminar I was at sure had quite a few more YP-resentment anecdotes to add to your collection.

I’d also love to see some real research done on this.