JR Hartley* would be truly befuddled by Yellow Pages’ latest marketing campaign, which involves London buses showing location-specific advertising messages.

Claimed to be the first GPS advertising campaign ever (anyone care to dispute that?) Springwise says that 25 buses will be fitted with LED panels (see pic), which will show the buses’ locations and highlight local shops, bars and restaurants, as they are approached.

If my inbox is anything to go by, there’s a real resurgence of interest in location based advertising among VCs and entrepreneurs, without breaking any confidences. This is despite the horrendous operational and logistical complexities of recruiting these types of advertisers. Just imagine trying to recruit local advertisers in one major city, let alone across a whole country, and you’ll see why this is probably beyond the reach of most startups.

Yellow Pages, on the other hand, already have this information and are faced with a core business that is slowly fading away. Therefore expanding into location based advertising is pretty natural for them, either as a content provider (which could be an angle for entrepreneurs) or as a player in their own right, which is probably more likely.

This campaign, by AKQA, has the double benefit of allowing them to explore some of the dynamics of this emerging sector, while promoting their Local Search product, which is the objective of the initiative.

Nice.

*JR Hartley was one of the best loved of all advertising characters in the UK and featured in one of the most popular TV ad campaigns of all time.  According to Wikipedia:

The advertisement shows an elderly man going into several bookshops asking for a book called Fly Fishing by an author named “J. R. Hartley”. Every attempt fails, and the next scene shows him at home looking dejected. His daughter, sympathising, hands him a copy of the Yellow Pages and the next scene features him looking delighted as a bookshop replies that they have a copy of the book. He asks them to keep it for him, and they ask for his name. He replies, “My name? Oh, yes, it’s J.R.Hartley”.

Despite a long and distinguished acting career, Norman Lumsden, the actor playing the old duffer, was best remembered for this role and when he died, aged 95, it made headline news.

Strangely, in a classic case of life imitating “art” a book on fly fishing was subsequently published under the name of JR Hartley and went on to become a best seller.