Thomson Local

Thomson Local is a local business telephone directory published in the United Kingdom by Thomson Directories Ltd., from its head office in Thomson House, Farnborough, Hampshire). It is the principal rival (and for the 1980s and some of the 1990s the sole rival) to the Yellow Pages (published by Thomson as the Thomson Yellow Pages until it was sold off to the privatised BT).

Thomson Local is a focused local area directory which has continually innovated with features such as colour and knock-out white advertisements. It was the first such directory in the UK to contain added value features such as local maps, local guides, and additional useful information beyond the actual business listings themselves.

Thomson Directories Ltd was originally formed to publish the Thomson Local in 1980 by The Thomson Corporation (after it had sold off its Thomson Yellow Pages business) and Dun & Bradstreet, in partnership. After trials in several areas, the Thomson Local was first published throughout Great Britain in 1981. It was owned by Seat Pagine Gialle S.p.A. of Italy until both companies fell into administration in August 2013. Thomson Local's assets were purchased by telephone data company Corporate Media Partners, preserving more than 300 jobs but with 170 redundancies.

The directory is still distributed without charge to households in printed form. In the 1990s, the company expanded its operations to include its own online directory in the shape of ThomsonLocal.com and a range of partner implementations supplying classified and keyword based listings to companies such as MSN, StreetMap, Pipex and many others and many others.

In July 2010, Thomson Local signed a multi-year agreement to become the UK's first reseller of adCenter, the pay-per-click platform for Microsoft's search engine Bing. Later that year, the company launched the thomsonlocal.com app for iPhone

External links

• The on-line version of the Thomson Local