U-Haul's $70 Million Yellow Pages Obsession

Before smartphones killed the phone book, U-Haul had the Yellow Pages on absolute lockdown. The moving company wasn't just an advertiser—it was the world's largest single-brand Yellow Pages advertiser, dumping a staggering $60 to $70 million every year into those thick paper directories that used to sit under every landline phone in America.

Think about that number for a second. Seventy million dollars. Annually. On paper books that people mostly used as booster seats and doorstops.

Why Yellow Pages?

U-Haul's strategy was actually brilliant for its time. Moving is intensely local—you need a truck right now in your city. And before Google, when you needed something local, you grabbed the Yellow Pages. U-Haul made sure that when you flipped to "Truck Rental," you'd see their ads everywhere. Multiple locations. Big spreads. Impossible to miss.

The company's marketing philosophy embraced omnipresence: bright orange trucks with prices painted directly on them, a massive dealer network, permanent trailer hitch installations across the country, and those ubiquitous Yellow Pages ads blanketing every community where someone might need to haul their life across town.

Then Everything Changed

In 2009-2010, U-Haul did something radical: they killed the entire $70 million Yellow Pages budget. Not reduced it. Not scaled it back. Eliminated it completely.

The company's director of local search later confirmed they went from spending nothing on digital to building relationships with the platforms that actually mattered: Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, Yelp. By 2022, their total advertising spend for six months was just $767,477—pocket change compared to the Yellow Pages era.

U-Haul's dramatic pullout became one of the most extreme examples of a major advertiser abandoning print directories. They didn't gradually transition or hedge their bets. They saw where the world was headed and ripped off the Band-Aid in one painful motion.

The Death Spiral

U-Haul wasn't alone in fleeing Yellow Pages, but their exit was symbolic. When one of your biggest advertisers—the company spending more than anyone else on your product—walks away entirely, it's not a warning sign. It's a death certificate.

Print Yellow Pages directories continued stumbling along for years after, but the writing was on the wall the moment major advertisers like U-Haul realized that appearing first in a Google search cost a fraction of what a full-page Yellow Pages ad did, reached more people, and actually worked better.

Today, most Yellow Pages directories are recycling bin filler. But for a brief, weird moment in marketing history, U-Haul owned them completely—spending more money on phone book ads than most companies spend on their entire marketing budget.