My gaming of the system was putting a display ad with multiple phone numbers representing different areas of the city. Worked very well. Learned that by observing what other businesses did (in entirely different areas I might add) and figuring that must be the reason (since I knew they didn't have all of those locations). Yellow pages, at least for what I did (was a "well developed category") was instant business and paid off very well. I increased the ad size every year. In some cases ran a small and large ad after being told (correctly) that some people liked to deal with a small company and some a large company. I landed a big contract once with the larger ad when only 3 companies were asked to bid.
All this was well before the internet when there wasn't step by step guides and/or blog posts and things like this were never taught you either figured them out on your old or someone you knew was nice enough to tell you. (In the old days it wasn't typical to share info and secrets like it is today..)
