Amid the frantic land grab in the internet video space — and in the desperate scramble by Yellow Pages to stay relevant in the face of the internet search boom — it appears that the YellowPages.com subsidiary of AT&T has outdriven its headlights with the launch of its new video advertising service.

Over at SearchMarketing Standard, Grant Crowell has an interesting article about his adventures trying to place a video ad on YellowPages.com, only to be led on the modern equivalent of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride:

What happens when America’s largest Yellow Pages company jumps into online local video advertising without an actual product? Here’s my story of one very frustrated marketer who went through 10 very strange days until realizing that many things in the IYP space are not what they seem on the promotional surface.

Crowell concludes his tale of woe with:

Bizarre, isn’t it? YellowPages boasts about having the largest visitor exposure and is a subsidiary of the largest telecommunications company in the U.S., yet they can’t even put together a proper program for online video advertising for local businesses. Not only is there no real “nationwide rollout” like their press release back claimed there was, but apparently they’re being too secretive to even mention what “pilot markets” they’re actually doing video advertisements for.

On thing the I’ve learned from my many years in the online marketing and search industry – the actual execution of a marketing program is eventually going to trump any hype. YellowPages.com’s bungling of their Video Profile promotion highlights the ongoing troubles in the IYP space between online video advertising and their sales channels. When the largest IYP chooses to withhold important correspondence about promotional programs like this from their own sales reps, much less train them adequately in taking sales calls, all of the buzz that YellowPages.com has generate will eventually sting them.

I can only add that Yellow Pages had better get its act together in the internet space, because their paper directory is quickly losing its relevance as a business marketing tool.  At DigiNovations, we do extremely careful tracking of where our leads come from, and Yellow Pages has steadily dropped in presence from 2001 — substituted out by internet search — to the point where not a single piece of our 2007 business could be traced to the paper directory.  That’s about $10,000 we needn’t spend next year.