176 CHAPTER 5 OBJECTIVESmuch more to Yellow Pages than the printed directory’
and ‘Is up with the latest technology’.The campaign also aimed to spread this message further
than with the previous year’s Treehouse campaign by
engaging more New Zealanders, and by using the cam-
paign to actively engage staff and advertiser customers. If
successful, this would help the wider business in remaining
New Zealanders’ first choice when searching for a business,
continuing to be perceived as the most effective advertising
medium in the minds of small and medium-size businesses
and performing better financially than the rest of the adver-
tising media category.Target audience
Yellow Pages has two targets: businesses wanting to advertise
and people wanting to find a business. Yellow Pages makes
its money from business advertisers, but only if those
businesses believe that their customers use Yellow Pages.
To make sure they do, it produces specific advertiser cam-
paigns to communicate the effectiveness of advertising in
Yellow Pages. But to maintain that effectiveness it is critical
that the consumer audience sees it as a modern, relevant
option in today’s digital world. And so the challenge was to
improve brand health among the consumer audience. Given
that there are few people who never have the need to look for
a business listing, the target is wide – all people aged 25–54.
What the Yellow Pages staff know about those people
is that they have all grown up with Yellow Pages, they have
all just been through the Internet revolution, and many of
them still think of the brand as ‘the way you found stuff
before the Internet’.The strategic thinking that inspired the idea
In a nutshell, the communications strategy for earning the
Yellow Pages brand a place in the twenty-first century was
to prove that it is the best way to get any job done today. It
is about actions, not words, about truly demonstrating the
power of Yellow Pages, and about playing up those more
modern online and mobile Yellow Pages products. The
Treehouse was proof of concept. It had been enormously
effective in terms of its media efficiency, its ability to get into
the conversations of New Zealanders, and ultimately its
effect on brand health. But Yellow Pages could not just do
the same thing again. It needed to build on the success of
that campaign with an updated strategy that would improve
perceptions among many more New Zealanders this time.
The Treehouse had touched 46% of New Zealanders in
total, a pretty good number considering that Yellow Pages
used very little traditional media. But it could not just speak to
those people again. It needed to grow that total awareness.
Also, only 2000 people – predominantly Aucklanders –actually got to eat at the restaurant and really live the whole
campaign experience end to end. The company needed
many more people to have the full, end-to-end experience.
The brief to the ColensoBBDO creatives in 2009 was to
create a ‘job done’ that could be experienced by thousands
more people, all over New Zealand, and to make it even
more participatory by using online, events and social
networking tools to a greater extent.The winning idea
On 14 September 2009, Yellow Pages and ColensoBBDO
challenged ordinary Kiwi Josh Winger to create the world’s
first chocolate bar that tasted of the colour yellow, using
only contacts from Yellow Pages’ online, mobile and print
products. Between October and March, Josh worked out of
his Mt Eden office with 45 businesses listed in Yellow Pages,
the media and thousands of New Zealanders, to create
Yellow Chocolate. With flavour technologists Sensient, and
taste tests throughout the country, he determined what the
colour yellow tasted like. With Donovan’s Chocolate he had
that taste made into a chocolate bar. With Seven Design he
created the packaging and retail displays. With Progressive
Enterprises he cut a distribution deal which saw the bar
stocked in Foodtown, Countdown and Woolworths super-
markets and Gull service stations throughout the country.
With Special Problems he created and launched an adver-
tising campaign for the bar.The winning media strategy and marketing
mix/execution
The media objective was to reach and involve as many
New Zealanders as possible, utilising as many media touch-
points as possible. The heart of the media strategy was a
completely new channel – a chocolate bar. The bar was of
course the culmination of the entire campaign, but also a highly
impactful piece of communication. As tens of thousands
of New Zealanders paid their $2 at Foodtown and then sat
down to bite into a bar of Yellow Chocolate, they had read
about Josh’s mission and learnt about Yellow Pages’ products
and how they are still the best way to get any job done.
Along the way, Yellow Pages put particular emphasis on
progressive media such as online, social networking, TV
content partnerships and of course the chocolate bar itself.
Yellow Pages was the first New Zealand brand to create a
live Twitter billboard, and it designed Facebook integration
that is now being used by Facebook itself as a case study
example. The primary reason for that emphasis on new media
was to achieve the brand objective of being perceived
as modern and relevant to this century. Of course, these
touchpoints would also be more involving and in many
cases more credible than traditional media. The full media
mix was as follows:M05_PELS3221_05_SE_C05.indd 176M05_PELS3221_05_SE_C05.indd 176 6/5/13 3:01 PM6/5/13 3:01 PM