New Yellow Pages May Include Breakfast : Telecommunications: Pacific Bell is currently test-marketing an edition of its phone book that includes ads, coupons and sample boxes of cereal.

Besides letting their fingers do the walking, thousands of Orange County residents starting today will get a chance to let their scissors do the clipping through their new editions of Pacific Bell’s Smart Yellow Pages.

In a bid to compete with direct-mail companies and newspapers for national advertising, Pacific Bell is test-marketing a new phone book that will include a pullout section of ads, coupons and special ad pages. And a major food company is sending along sample boxes of breakfast cereal with the directories.

The experimental phone books, which will be sent to select areas of the county, will contain discount coupons for such products as Carl’s Jr. hamburgers, Dollar rental cars and Maxwell House coffee.

The concept for the new phone book was developed by Pacific Bell Directory, a Pacific Bell subsidiary based in San Francisco, in hopes of luring national advertisers by making the directory more attractive and timely.

About 100,000 of the 800,000 county households receiving phone books will also get sample boxes of General Mills Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Golden Grahams breakfast cereals.

Although mass mailings of consumer product samples have been a routine marketing practice for years, such samples are a first for the yellow pages industry, said Larry Small, vice president of marketing for the Yellow Pages Publishers Assn., a Troy, Mich., trade group.

“Pac Bell is very innovative and willing to try some new things,” he said.

The cereal boxes will be distributed in select zip codes with demographic characteristic favored by General Mills, said Neal Polachek, national marketing manager for Pacific Bell Directory.

Polachek said the costs of distributing product samples with the phone books are similar to the cost of direct-mail programs. Market studies have shown that consumers have high confidence in the credibility of yellow pages directories, he said, and Pacific Bell hopes that advertisers will want to take advantage of that favorable image.

Phone books also reach more households than newspapers, magazines or even direct mail, Polachek said.

“We didn’t do this blindly. We did some focus groups in March in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. All participants felt that these (coupons and product samples) added value to the book,” Polachek said.

The experiment represents the latest change among yellow pages publishers. Phone books were little changed for decades until the court-ordered breakup of American Telephone & Telegraph Co. in 1984. Since then, publishers have tried to improve usage of the directories by adding splashier graphics, more color and more consumer information.

National accounts contributed about 20% of the $8.3 billion in revenue reported by yellow pages publishers last year, Small said. On average, 19% of all adults refer to the yellow pages each day, and 78% consult the directories at least once a month, he said.