Over the weekend, I was headed home from a family visit. I’ve been trying to negotiate the best diagonal passage across New Hampshire, and I enlisted the navigation system to make that happen.

You see, in Massachusetts, the roads go east and west pretty easily, but north-south travel is a little more complicated. By the same token, northern New England (Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont) are oriented specifically for north-south transit.  This results in some substantial detours. So, for example, if you want to travel between Vermont and Maine, you’ll most likely find yourself on I-495 in Massachusetts, Massachusetts’ Route 2, I-89 in New Hampshire, or New Hampshire’s Route 101. Unless you select “Most direct route” in your navigation system and try out the slower travel of small-town New England.

Since we were playing with the navigation device, we saw an “Information” icon and decided to click it. There, we found choices for upcoming restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and so on and so forth.

I should point out that this type of scenario has long been the example for location-based services. The specific example has been mobile advertising — that a restaurant will send you a coupon to stop in along your way.

Which brings us to the fundamental question. Is the opportunity here for direct marketing in the form of the coupon? Or is it another form of local advertising we often forget — Yellow Pages and directory assistance. Even in a small town such as Londonderry, New Hampshire, we had more than a dozen restaurants to choose from. And the last thing we wanted was a dozen coupons. Our navigation system provided directions and a phone number. Through the wonders of Bluetooth, we could connect a speakerphone call just by clicking on the number.

So which is more important, finding a marketing manager to manage a campaign that will push out low-CPM coupons to a mobile device…or charging significantly more for that Yellow Pages listing that ultimately ends up on the right TomTom at the right time?

Maybe another way to think about it is that navigation devices are a new lease on life for long-standing Yellow-pages and directory assistance businesses.