WRITTEN ON March 2nd, 2010 BY peter AND STORED IN Targeting, directory distribution

If you heard a distant noise around the Wirral area on Saturday morning, it may just have been the sound of several LinkDirect employees choking on their breakfasts.

Then again, perhaps that’s over-estimating the number of Telegraph readers on Merseyside.

Whatever, it was certainly inconsiderate of the newspaper in question to run this article on page 3 of Saturday’s edition, even if it does in retrospect seem an entirely appropriate location for it. In short, it was nothing more than a 192.com press release dressed up as news.

In a nutshell, the article highlights a new Local Government Association campaign which calls for an opt-in system for telephone directories, which it claims are costing councils £7million.

I’ve so far come up with six reasons why the argument at the heart of the article is fundamentally flawed. In rough order of importance, they are:

1. On a daily basis, we see the considerable levels of feedback we receive from the public if we for whatever reason do not deliver a phone book. For every call we receive asking not to receive a copy, we must get about 100 asking exactly the opposite.

2. The involvement of 192.com in this campaign is nothing more than a self-seeking and rather shabby attempt to skew the UK marketplace in favour of online searches (they hope via them). However, please see my comment on the Kelsey blog about their levels of (in)accuracy.

3. Forcing householders to opt-in to phone book delivery would decimate an industry employing thousands in the UK and would (as was mentioned in the article) discriminate against huge chunks of the UK population.

4. Directory publishers are constantly working on improvements to book size and weight to reduce paper usage - see Yell’s recent announcement as an example (smaller Yellow Pages pictured above).

5. The typical “opter-out” tends to be : single/urban/cosmopolitan or old/retired/gentrified villages - if we are to tailor our whole delivery around one or two slices of UK population then we would be short-changing huge swathes of the country - for example, anyone who has a family, who hardly ever appear on any opt-out lists.

6. The argument that “the public is too apathetic, therefore we will decide what is best for them” is frankly ridiculous. Try that argument at the next general election.

Summing up then, I’d say that the system we already have in place - opt-out - is perfectly adequate. Journalists should do a modicum of checking before  producing what is in essence a very shabby PR piece on behalf of 192.com.