ATLANTA, March 22 /PRNewswire/ -- BellSouth announced today a new advertising campaign aimed at continuing the company's growth in usage of The Real Yellow Pages among the growing Hispanic residential and business communities located in the Southeast U.S.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050322/CLTU003 )

The campaign features a Taxi that allows users of The Real Yellow Pages to have a vehicle that "takes you anywhere, anytime." The campaign, which begins later this month in areas of Florida and Georgia, consists of broadcast, print and direct mail.

Ken Ray, Vice President of Marketing for BellSouth Advertising and Publishing, says the Hispanic community is a key market for The Real Yellow Pages from BellSouth, and the company is committed to bringing the benefits of its print product to these important consumers.

"The Hispanic/Latino Community had an estimated buying power of more than $686 billion in 2004. As the leading Yellow Pages provider in the Southeast U.S., we are committed to connecting this buying power with the businesses that depend on our products for their success," Ray said. "Our 'Taxi' campaign is aimed at showing this growing market the ease and benefits of letting their fingers do the walking in The Real Yellow Pages."

The ad campaign, developed by Machado Garcia-Serra/Miami, will concentrate the broadcast media on South Florida, as well as areas of Central Coastal Florida. The radio campaign and direct mail campaigns will target South and Central Florida, as well as the Atlanta market.

Ray said The Real Yellow Pages' commitment to the growing Hispanic market is not just geared around the ad campaign, but can also be seen in the products themselves.

"Our South Florida, Central Florida and Atlanta markets are just a sampling of markets with bilingual directories. Additionally, we created our first ever directory cover in Miami with headings in English and Spanish. These efforts and product enhancements show our continued work in bringing the most robust yellow pages directory to our Hispanic communities," Ray said.

Statistics show that approximately 74 percent of Latinos prefer having bilingual directories in their household. BellSouth provides 15 directories with Hispanic Sections in four states.

About BellSouth Advertising and Publishing

BellSouth Advertising & Publishing Corporation (BAPCO) is the leading provider of print and Internet Yellow Pages products in the southeast. BAPCO publishes 66 million copies of the print Yellow Pages in more than 500 editions in the nine-state BellSouth region. Users referred to The Real Yellow Pages(R) from BellSouth nearly 2 billion times last year and made nearly 200 million searches on RealPages.com ( http://www.realpages.com/ ) in 2004. The Real Yellow Pages is a powerful information resource, linking buyers and sellers, with approximately 85 percent of consumers who reference the directories' most frequently used headings making a purchase based on their findings.

About BellSouth

BellSouth Corporation is a Fortune 100 communications company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and a parent company of Cingular Wireless, the nation's largest wireless voice and data provider.

Backed by award winning customer service, BellSouth offers the most comprehensive and innovative package of voice and data services available in the market. Through BellSouth Answers(R), residential and small business customers can bundle their local and long distance service with dial up and high speed DSL Internet access, satellite television and Cingular(R) Wireless service. For businesses, BellSouth provides secure, reliable local and long distance voice and data networking solutions. BellSouth also offers online and directory advertising through BellSouth(R) RealPages.com(R) and The Real Yellow Pages(R).

More information about BellSouth can be found at http://www.bellsouth.com/

CONTACT: Ed Patterson of BellSouth Corporation, +1-678-406-2457, or
Ed.Patterson@bellsouth.com

Web site: http://www.bellsouth.com/

Company News On-Call: http://www.prnewswire.com/comp/095650.html