#YELLOW PAGES LOGO REGISTRATION#
The familiar "walking fingers" logo and the name "Yellow Pages" are not protected by any federal trademark registration or copyright. Businesses are being deceived into paying for what they erroneously believe to be their usual Yellow Pages ad. These alternative directories often are not widely distributed, or may not be published at all. But, in fact, some of these "invoices" are solicitations for listings in alternative business directories that differ from the well-known Yellow Pages. D.J.Produced in cooperation with the Yellow Pages PublishersĪssociation and the United States Postal Inspection Serviceīusinesses across the country are receiving what appear to be invoices for ad space in the familiar, locally distributed, Yellow Pages directories.
The business had to change their phone number due to the notoriety created by the ad the previous number is now the company’s fax line. A call to them elicited the response that the ad was indeed genuine and had been run in the mid-1990s, and the illustration was also used on the company’s vans until people started making a fuss about it. Flooring in Brighton, East Sussex, with one of the phone numbers shown. However, there is indeed a business by the name of D.J.
The ad includes no address or other location information. (This can actually be explained rationally, because in some parts of the world the different systems used for landline and mobile phones produced phone numbers with different numbers of digits.) The phone number(s) listed appears odd - 21 digits long or two numbers of differing lengths. The headline of the ad (“LAID BY THE BEST”) is an obvious sexual double entendre. 
(As the graphic displayed at the bottom of this page indicates, the illustration may have originated with items commonly distributed in bars and restaurants, such as matchbooks or cocktail napkins.)
The subject matter - a woman holding a champagne glass - seemingly has nothing to do with the product or service being advertised, which is flooring. Several clues might suggest that this image was something put together as a joke rather than a genuine Yellow Pages ad: Such is the nature of the putative advertisement from the Yellow Pages (a pre-Internet printed phone directory of business services) for a flooring company displayed above, which is accompanied by an illustration of a woman holding a champagne glass that, when flipped upside-down and cropped in half horizontally, resembles an image of a woman with no lower undergarments touching herself in a strategically sensitive area. The nature of “subliminal,” of course, means that these alleged hidden persuaders are not obvious to the ordinary viewer and may require intense scrutiny or an unusual approach (such as viewing an image backwards, upside-down, or with a magnifying glass) to discern. Some critics have long maintained that companies and their advertising agencies often employ subliminal advertising to increase sales by concealing words and images (usually of a sexually suggestive nature) in their advertisements.
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