People with long memories or a small-town upbringing can recall how quickly things changed when a second TV station or a second big shopping mall arrived. It was the end of a monopoly, and pretty much everybody welcomed it.

Well, it has happened in Calgary in the phone-book business. For about 90 years, one company had the market cornered. Now there are two, and as you’d expect, the newcomer is enticing customers with fresh features.

Phone Directories Company, Inc. (PDC) is publishing its third directory in Calgary. You’ll know the one we mean by mentioning its spectacular, award-winning cover depicting the Calgary skyline. PDC also publishes directories for Fort McMurray, Peace Country, and Alberta’s Rocky Mountain communities.

Although the company is relatively new to Alberta, it has actually been around for 33 years in the United States and Canada.



Deliveries of each year’s book have gone out to every residence and business in Calgary, just like the established SuperPages.

PDC sales managers Amanda Leckie and Bob Condon expected they’d have their work cut out for them in trying to break lifelong habits, but in the company’s brief presence in Calgary it has already secured an impressive chunk of the market.

Phone Directories commissioned independent research, and to ensure respondents actually had the new directory handy, the polling firm asked individuals to read aloud the publishing code found on each book’s spine.

The results indicate about a quarter of Calgary’s residents prefer the new telephone directory to the established one. About one-fifth have no preference.



And of the remainder, about half say they use the new directory some of the time.

“That’s impressive considering we’ve only been here three years,” Condon says.

Making inroads like that required imagination and a good sense of what consumers and advertisers might want in a phone book if it was redesigned from cover to cover. PDC came up with numerous features – known in the trade as “usage drivers.”

The directory incorporates guides to weddings and local communities and events, and its white pages list only businesses, not residences.

“A lot of people carry this in their car because when they’re driving around looking for a business because they don’t necessarily want to look through a big white pages book,” Condon says.



Addresses include postal codes. Listings pages are laid out in an easy-to-read three-column format as opposed to the old four-column squeeze. Advertisers pay no extra cost for full-colour ads.

The book’s dining guide includes full menus supplied by local restaurants, a particularly popular feature that Leckie herself finds indispensable since moving to Calgary from Vancouver.

“Consumers love to use the menu guide,” she says. “It’s especially popular because of all the people moving to Calgary.”

Leckie explains that Phone Directories Company was founded in Carbon County, Utah in 1970 by Marc C. Bingham. “He wanted a product that serviced market areas, not utility lines.”

Traditional phone companies tend to carve up populations according to telephone-exchange boundaries with no regard for consumer spending patterns.



PDC now operates in 127 communities throughout the western states including Alaska, and stretching from coast to coast in Canada, in all cases distinguished by acclaimed book design and user-friendly content.

For four of the past five years, the Association of Directory Publishers has named PDC Publisher of the Year.

But Leckie and Condon concede the most important question to advertisers is how many eyeballs are actually looking at those attractive directories.

“We do all these nice extra features, the pretty colours,” Leckie says, “but at the end of the day, it’s a phone book.”

What’s impressive about that new phone book is how quickly it has achieved residency in so many Calgary homes. PDC isn’t out to replace the old book and create a new monopoly. The reality, they tell advertisers, is that the two books are here to stay, and it’s good business to recognize both of them.

“We’re just offering choice,” Condon says. “A lot of times, people are using both books anyway.” Leckie adds: “It doesn’t make sense to only advertise in one or the other.”

In many homes, the two competing products sit side-by-side near a phone.

In others, they’ll be separated by split loyalties.

When told by someone that their 18-year-old daughter had grabbed the new PDC directory for her own as soon as it landed on the doorstep, Leckie says she’s heard of that before, and adds with a laugh, “It’s the most-stolen book in North America.”

Leckie and Condon can be reached by calling 403.258.3343 or by visiting www.phonedir.com