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Seeing red (or is that yellow?)

It seems somewhat unbelievable that a company can claim a colour as its own private property -- but it's something that has happened many times over.

IBM claims a certain shade of (big) blue, Cadbury claims a shade of purple and Yellow Pages claims (of course) yellow.

While you don't often hear of law suits brought by IBM or Cadbury, those who run Yellow Pages are really quick to call out the sharks whenever someone dares to infringe their trademark on the colour.

I recall being challenged by Telecom Directories many years ago when I owned the domain pages.co.nz and set up a sub-domain yellow.pages.co.nz. Through some clever maneuvering I was able to turn this into a handsome earner and a check of the domain registry shows that Yellow Pages are still protecting this back-door to their trademark by hanging on to the name and directing it to their main website.

Since then, several others have dared to use the colour yellow on the web and fallen foul of Telecom Directories.

Henk Kloss was just one to feel their wrath and they instigated bankruptcy proceedings against him when (from memory) a court ruled in their favour for a very significant sum of costs associated with this trademark.

Now it appears that the new owners of the Yellow Pages trademark are just as (if not more) aggressively protecting their exclusive right to the colour.

According to this story (Stuff), Yellow Pages is suing an Aussie university student for infringing on their urine-stain-colour.

At the heart of the issue is another domain name, yellowbook.co.nz and a claim that data has been copied from The Yellow Pages database.

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I guess that we should all feel rather insulted by Yellow Pages' legal action, since they're effectively trying to convince the court that we (the average Net users) are so stupid that we can't tell the difference between the "genuine" yellow pages and some cheap knock-off.

But could it be that Yellow Pages are worried their recent massive price-hikes in fees charged for listings in its online directory might make people look at alternatives?

Although they claim that they've improved their search engine and added new features, I for one still find that yellowpages.co.nz seldom provides a result when I'm trying to hunt down the supplier of a product or service.

Google is your friend when it comes to being found online, not Yellowpages.co.nz.

Quite frankly, I think that those companies who are being asked to stump up anywhere from $300 to $1,320 a year for inclusion in Yellow Pages' online database would be far better off spending a small fraction of that putting up a simple webpage and making sure it's well-ranked by Google.

Yellow Pages offers the ability to include only a very small number of keywords and in many cases that's not enough to fully represent a company's full range of products or services. A simple webpage can be set up to contain references to *every* line sold and every service offered -- at a lower cost and with a much better chance of being found.

As I suggested some months ago -- Telecom did *very* well in selling its Yellow Pages business when it did. The days when simply throwing all the Yellow Pages ads into a crude database with a simple search engine up front and expecting people to pay and arm and a leg for inclusion are gone.

Smart companies will at least do these two things:

1. Have their own website, or at least a simple web-page listing their products, services and contact details.
2. Create and post a small promotional video to YouTube, including an on-screen URL that leads people to their webpage (above).

Neither of these things are particularly expensive or hard.

Neither has to be "super-slick professional" quality, their sole role is to help people find you on the Net using the two most active vectors (Google and YouTube).

As for Yellow?

Well yellow is "so 1990s", the new colour is *anything* you want it to be. That's the power of the Net.

What do you think?

Are Yellow Pages being (yet again) overly enthusiastic about protecting their jaundiced colour on the web?

Should companies even be granted exclusive use of a particular colour or shade as a trademark?

What's the best strategy for businesses that want to be "found" through the Net?

Is it really worth $1,000+ to be listed in the online Yellow Pages directory or has the day of the online Yellow Pages been and gone?

Have your say on this...

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