I saw a pile of phonebooks over the last few days. Made me think of thelessons of “nobody” and “everybody” in marketing…
with Printed Phone Books versus Digital Search, the largest ad platform:

– 97% of the USA uses digital search to find a business
– 70% of people with phone books NEVER open them.
– The phone directory started in 1878…it listed 50 people
– 11% of the country still use the white pages

You need to request a phone book; many laws have been passed banning them…but New Zealand still has them delivered to 93% of their population.

– Most companies stopped printing them in 2019.
– Digital Search grabbed about $55 Billion last year
– The print phone book biz still garners a few BILLION annually in the USA.

So even when you compare the largest ad platform on the planet to one of the smallest, still no such thing as “everybody and nobody”.

Well, except one: Nobody ever owned the term “yellow pages”.