In 1983, the hearts of the British public were well and truly won with the introduction of the fictional character JR Hartley to promote the Yellow Pages.
Abbott Mead Vickers produced the 60-second ad depicting an old man looking for a copy of JR Hartley’s Fly Fishing. After going from bookshop to bookshop, he comes home empty-handed, that’s when his daughter gives him the Yellow Pages which helps him finally find a store that stocks them. The ad closes when the audience realizes that the man is JR Hartley himself.
The brief is to change the perception that the Yellow Pages are only for emergencies but instead can be used for the finer things in life. In the ad, the voiceover declares: “Good old Yellow Pages. We don’t just help with the bad things in life like a clogged drain. We’re there for the good things, too.”
The ad busted the myth and, as a result, saw Yellow Pages increase from 6% to 20%. The Yellow Pages has also seen an increase in inquiries to the British Library and bookshops.
The commercial touched the hearts of British television viewers, and bookstores and libraries soon began receiving requests for the JR Hartley book. Of course, the character is fictional and there is no such book. And here, angling expert Michael Russell saw an opportunity. He wrote a book about fly fishing and published it under the pseudonym JR Hartley. Publisher Stanley Paul even hired Norman Lumsden, who played JR Hartley in the advert, to promote the book as the public face of the author. The book flew off the shelves. It became so popular that there were eight reprints and it became a bestseller selling 130,000 copies by Christmas of 1991 alone. The book even spawned a sequel called JR Hartley Casts Again: More Memories of Angling Days
