Yellowbook has unveiled a new television ad campaign, replacing the kinda cheesy Kung Fu ads (sorry, David Carradine, you did what you could) with a much slicker campaign that focuses on promoting use of Yellowbook’s online directory (which is also sporting a new look and feel, modeled closely after its sister IYP Yell.com).

Yellowbook (a unit of the U.K. firm Yell Group) has also unveiled a more streamlined logo. It makes a lot of sense for the company to bring its overall design sensibilities up a notch if it hopes to remodel itself into a more platform-agnostic image. Its previous logo had seemed dated.

The new ads rely on the tried-and-true practice of setting up a somewhat amusing need for a business found under a common YP heading, then off to Yellowbook.com and the problem is solved, perhaps with a twist of irony. But this campaign marks a great leap forward in production quality from previous Yellowbook efforts. Here are two ads from the new campaign (the first doubles as a cautionary tale on lower back tattoos). Of course, Yellowbook isn’t delivering quite the Tom Cruise “Minority Report” experience that’s shown here. In fairness, the ads are supposed to be depicting the Yellow Pages of the future. 

The ads’ underlying theme of “finding what you are really looking for” is clever, since it underlines a key point of difference between IYP and search (at least for now), which is that Yellow Pages data are targeted and structured and designed to give consumers what they want with no extraneous material.  The ads were produced by Yellowbook’s new agency, Gotham Inc. (replacing Trahan Burden & Charles) and were shot by Vadim Perelman, director of the film “House of Sand and Fog.” I guess there is credibility, and then there is “I’ve directed Sir Ben Kingsley” credibility.