At the recent Directory Driven Commerce conference, Ezana Raswork of Canada’s Yellow Pages Group gave a presentation detailing how YPG has phased out the inclusion of paid advertising on its directories’ front covers. Part of the logic is that the front cover is valuable real estate for promoting the directory brand (not the brand of a local cosmetic surgeon) as well as usage of the directory itself.

We plan to explore this issue in more depth in upcoming TKG coverage. We are curious, in the meantime, what your views are on the topic. Are front cover ads an abomination, or is this a silly fuss over "branding" a commodity product, so why not take the revenue? Submit your comments to let us know what you think.