Clemenger Proximity Melbourne launches Yellow Pages ‘Hidden Pizza Restaurant’ campaign
CB Exclusive – After a huge amount of speculation in newspapers, magazines and radio shows, non-stop blog chatter and tweets galore, the groundbreaking Yellow Pages Hidden Pizza Restaurant campaign will be revealed this Sunday night.
Yellow Pages creates a campaign every year to demonstrate to potential advertisers how effective advertising in the Yellow Pages really is. This year, in conjunction with Clemenger Proximity Melbourne, it became something far beyond a traditional advertising campaign. Together, Yellow Pages and Proximity built a restaurant – and then hid it. The only place they made the details available was in the Yellow Pages.
Hence, the Hidden Pizza Restaurant was born.
Using a limited letter box drop and a blog site, people were told that for two weeks, the pizzas would be free – the only catch being they had to find the restaurant’s contact details first.
The only clue people were given was to “look for it the way you would any other business”. Once people found the number, they were able to ring and order and have an SMS with the address of the restaurant sent to their mobile. The location was hidden at the end of an alleyway, through a roller door, down a service lift and underground. In true Melbourne style, there was no sign outside.
General Manager, Marketing for Sensis (Yellow Pages’ parent company), Michelle Sherwood, said the campaign demonstrated in a very public way the effectiveness of advertising through the Yellow Pages search network.
“We’ve been using testimonial-style ads for a few years and we know they work. This campaign was an experiment to re-engage both users and advertisers with the Yellow Pages brand and it exceeded our expectations,” Sherwood said.
“It proved that if you want your business to be found, Yellow Pages is a great place to be,” she added.
Clemenger Proximity Melbourne Creative Chairman James McGrath said the concept was the ultimate litmus test for the Yellow Pages brand.
“We demonstrated the effectiveness of advertising in the Yellow Pages in the toughest conditions possible – we built a business, hid it, challenged people to find it and filmed the results,” he said.
“I don’t think a client has ever been this brave when it comes to putting their own product on the line,” McGrath added.
The reaction was incredible. The word spread and soon queues were forming down the alleyway and around the corner and along neighbouring streets. In two short weeks, over 8,000 people found the Hidden Pizza Restaurant – with over 70% of them finding it in the Yellow Pages.
James McGrath said the campaign had really pushed the agency to a new place.
“We have no experience in creating a restaurant and this one had to be built from scratch. The guys came up with an idea which we instantly recognised as being amazing but at the same time, scared the hell out of us,” McGrath said.
“That seems to be becoming the hallmark of a great idea in this place,” he laughed.
While the restaurant was open, Clemenger Proximity was busy shooting a series of TV ads, the first of which will go to air this Sunday. Directed by Patrick Hughes, the 30- and 15-second ads will be supported by print, radio and online executions.
30 Comments
So ultimately, most people found the restaurant via…word of mouth?
you know what’s really bad? bookend advertising in newspapers!!
Let me guess they use bookend shapes for their press ads. Yawn.
This was a good idea, but WOM kinda undermined the effectiveness of it in the end. A short while into the campaign, I was sent the address on text by four different people.
Nice pizzas! Thanks clems.
Still, well done on probably the world’s most impossible brief: make people think using yellow pages online is somehow as good as or better than google.
Which is really hard to do, because yellow pages is shit.
that Fat Tony guy is super fucking annoying.
too much of him!
It’s a fantastic idea and would have been an absolute stonker in 1994, before the internet.
http://anthillonline.com/hidden-pizza-restaurant-reveals-not-so-hidden-flaws-in-yellow-pages-digital-strategy/
Don’t forget the flyer.
There is an interesting analysis of this campaign here http://anthillonline.com/hidden-pizza-restaurant-reveals-not-so-hidden-flaws-in-yellow-pages-digital-strategy/ ~ not a rave review and highlights the difficulties yellow are having evolving into a space where users have so much control.
@ Anonymous Word of Mouth and Yellow go hand in hand, its one of the metrics Yellow will use when showing the power of Yellow
i new about it and never use the yellow pages. they also have a website.
It’s good to see the campaign reached every echelon of society. Welcome 12:48, try not to touch anything OK?
All this campaign demonstrates is that yellow pages dont’ understand their audience or their market. The treehouse campaign was valid because it showed you what you could do with YP that you can’t really do as well with online search engines. This campaign demonstrated that online search is actually better than their own product. Poor strategy, poor thinking, and very poor leadership both from client and agency.
12:20
I agree. Bookend newspaper sooooo student and creatively forced.
Im not sure why this has moved onto different print shapes but yeah i agree about using bookends to try and force an idea. Like who even holds a paper like that?? Hopefully with the introduction of iPad we can finally put it in room 101
Case studies are the new scam. Clever, ad guys.
I liked it, good to see a big brand do something else
Great idea.
is that Charles Clapshaw in the brown shirt or the creative guy from the Comm bank ads?
and the flyer ….
I don’t even like pizza.
This is so last week
The main flaw was the lack of ‘Bamercise’ to work off the pizza after you had finished it.
Wow, some good work coming from Melbourne. This one and the Leo Burnett one below it. On this one – well done PB, first job out the door and it’s a-rock all the way.
Interesting.
But what if the pizza wasn’t free? And what if they didn’t do the leaflet campaign?
For most businesses that advertise in the Yellow Pages, the book takes up most of their ad budget, if not all of it. (It’s not cheap.)
In a way, this campaign seems to be stronger proof of the effectiveness of letter box drops (and blogs) than it is for Yellow Pages. And for word of mouth (as someone else said).
Also, if someone talked about a restaurant – any restaurant – on a blog or even just in conversation, you wouldn’t go to the Yellow Pages to find the address, you’d go to the White Pages (or, more likely nowadays, Google it). That’s what people do when they know the name.
Yellow Pages is where you go when you’re not looking for a specific place, but want to find something in a particular category – plumbers in your suburb etc. (But again, we all probably all Google that as well, nowadays.)
The way this test was conducted, how do we know Yellow Pages wasn’t the last place people looked, after exhausting all other possibilities?
Years ago, Yellow Pages used to give selected businesses a second phone number. The only place that number would be listed was the Yellow Pages. The call count, especially when compared to the other phone number which was listed everywhere else, was then a true reflection of the effectiveness of the book.
So while this is a genuinely clever idea, I can’t see that it really proves anything. It’s not comparing apples to apples.
Pardon the ignorance, what’s bookend newspaper ads ?
We should exercise Spamercise on people who keep promoting their own work all through the comment section. Let it go Euro.
Noticed the references to the Anthill piece. Here’s Yellow Pages’ response after the restaurant had closed – http://anthillonline.com/yellow-pages-responds-to-hidden-pizza-campaign-critics/
1.17 – the campaign also helped raise awareness that Yellow Pages is more than just a book. The content is now available online, on search engines, digital maps, on mobile, sat nav, over the phone and more to come. Small businesses value the ease at which they can go to market and across channels in a big way
10:23 – our metered call program is still alive and well (unique number included in ads to track calls). Now in print and online. Great way to show hard return on investment
For Yellow Pages, it is marketing dollars poorly spent. The program mostly proved that Yellow Pages don’t understand social and online media, and that there are better ways to find a business than through their website. It also did more for Clemenger than Sensis.
Just as an example, there would have been around 13550 searches on Google during that period for “Pizza in Melbourne”, and even with the power of Clemenger and Sensis, Yellow Pages managed to capture just 5600.
As I have said before, wouldn’t it have been better if Yellow Pages did this, but drove the traffic to existing advertisers through the Yellow Pages? If I owned a Pizza Restaurant in Melbourne and advertised through Yellow Pages, I would be mighty upset they just set up a competitor.
This does not prove the effectiveness of yellow pages, it proves the power of Google.
That’s how the word of mouth was spread.
How many people actually have a copy of Yellow Pages at home anymore?
A whole bunch got delivered to my apartment block recently and not one person took a copy.
They just sat there for weeks then got chucked in the recycling. Making them green pages, I suppose.
JUST PROVES THE POWER OF A FREEBIE
If yellow pages was so good, they only needed to place the advert in the yellow pages & not advertise any where else – my guess is if they had done this they wouldn’t have seen anyone.