Ambassador Media Group LLC (Ambassador Publications) company produced yellow pages directories for the Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Nassau, Queens, Staten Island and southern Westchester County markets up until April. Picking up on the market opportunity is a new kind of yellow pages company, Local Services Pages.

CEO and cofounder of Local Service Pages, Derrick Bliss, seized an opportunity to create a strong-performing directory. Bliss previously was the director of sales at Ambassador. He believes in the value of local yellow pages. Prior to working at Ambassador, he spent time helping run his family business, a plumbing and drain cleaning company. A major key to his family’s success was directory advertising.

The Local Service Pages is not your ordinary book; it focuses on service-based companies, a category that continues to have solid usage. Bliss has a strong belief that the print product will endure, evolving into a condensed version that’s centered around the business categories receiving the majority of usage, and integrated with other media.

The fully recyclable 7×9 print book includes user-friendly content: subway maps, coupons, menus and a guide on recycling resources for consumers. Each ad has a QR code that drives traffic online to an advertiser’s website, Facebook page or mobile site. The ads also include call tracking, which Bliss says is “critical to advertisers to see performance and ROI.” The ad offerings are competitively priced against SuperMedia and Hibu. Besides full color ads with QR codes, the core digital offering is a premium placement on their partner digital site thumplocal.com. Local Service Pages offers Thump’s online products and services to their customers, complementing their print campaigns.

Bliss says they are having great success with the new model. The first book will be distributed to 200K+ homes and businesses in the Bronx in time for Halloween. Coming in 2013 will be the Staten Island (February) and Brooklyn (May) books, followed by continued growth throughout New York and beyond.