Marketing Communications

CASE 5 175

Throughout the world, Yellow Pages businesses faced a

tumultuous 2009. As online search became increasingly

mobile and ubiquitous, the relevance of the printed Yellow

Pages product declined further, resulting in inevitable

declines in usage as people migrated to the Internet to look

up a business. With the recent arrival of multiple new online

and digital advertising channels available to businesses both

small and large, the need to be in Yellow Pages decreased,

resulting in inevitable declines in advertiser numbers and

revenue. This challenge was made even more difficult in

2009 as businesses across the board faced a recession and

chose to spend significantly less on advertising. Total New

Zealand advertising spend declined by 12% overall, and

17% in the case of other print-based media, the most com-

parable with Yellow Pages’ core offering. Online advertising

did grow, but only at 11%, and off a very small base. New

Zealand’s Yellow Pages Group faced serious and widely

touted problems with its yellow.co.nz search experience,

which frequently provided inaccurate or incomplete results,

turning online Kiwis back to Google for their searches.

Clearly, communications could not address any of these

fundamental business and marketplace issues. So Yellow

Pages got going on print innovations to improve the relevance

of the print product, broader advertiser packages to address

advertiser declines and technology investment to fix the

online search problems. These innovations and improve-

ments would drive greater usage and revenue in the future,

but they would take at least a year to develop and launch.

So, in the meantime, the decision was taken to continue to

use communications to improve perceptions of the Yellow

Pages brand. Communications and brand perception alone

would not be enough to turn the business around, but a

stronger brand would facilitate a much more successful

launch of those improvements in 2010 and beyond.

The global challenge is to give Yellow Pages a genuine

place in the twenty-first century, or haemorrhage business

at the current rate and see the death of the brand within a

decade. For Yellow Pages to have a place in the twenty-first

century it was necessary to challenge the deeply entrenched

attitudes and behaviours that surrounded the brand:

From To

A thing of the past Modern and

relevant

A book Online and mobile

Lagging way behind Google A leader in search

Used when there is a problem Used when there is

an opportunity

Used when not found on Google Used for first search

There had been a major push earlier in 2008, spending

NZ$2.3 million on a TV advertising campaign, and it had

had no discernible effect on brand health or usage. With a

fraction of that budget and such firmly held consumer per-

ceptions, Yellow Pages needed to do something completely

different.

Yellow Pages had seen great success with its ‘ Treehouse

Restaurant’ campaign in 2008. To prove that Yellow Pages

is still the best way to get any job done, the ad agency

challenged Aucklander Tracey Collins to build a restaurant

halfway up a redwood pine tree, using nothing but contacts

from Yellow Pages website, mobile app and book. The

agency publically followed her progress and, in January

2009, opened the Treehouse Restaurant to a sellout two-

month season. The campaign drew unprecedented attention,

being featured on over 20 000 websites internationally and

in the pages of over 100 different magazines. It was reviewed

on every major NZ TV property and was the lead story on

the front page of the NZ Herald. From a media spend of only

NZ$436 000 the campaign achieved 61% awareness of the

campaign, showing the idea to be almost twice as efficient

as Yellow Pages’ historic traditional TV advertising. The per-

ceptions of that 61% towards the brand have been enhanced

significantly, proving that Yellow Pages was persuading New

Zealanders to re-evaluate their view of an old and deeply

entrenched brand. As a result of the largely online campaign,

monthly unique visitors to the whebsite (yellow.co.n2)

were driven above 1 million for the first time ever, and have

grown the website’s share of first search at the cost of their

goliath competitor Google. It had improved relevance and

modernity perceptions significantly, leaving brand health in

a far stronger position. And so the agency was tasked with

producing a follow-up campaign, and challenged to improve

on the performance of the Treehouse, but with a budget

17% smaller. While $2.4 million was spent on the Treehouse,

only $2 million could be spent in 2009.

This case history describes a follow-up campaign launch-

ing a chocolate brand through Yellow Pages to put the brand

on the map as a relevant and modern way to build a business.

Campaign objectives

The overall objective of the 2009 campaign was to continue

to challenge New Zealanders’ deeply entrenched perceptions

of Yellow Pages and earn the brand a place in the twenty-

first century. Specifically, the objectives were to:

z Get New Zealanders to think of Yellow Pages as more of

a leader in search, rather than a laggard to Google, and

improve its brand tracking score for ‘Leading the way in

search’.

z Get New Zealanders to see Yellow Pages as a modern,

contemporary, innovative brand and improve brand

tracking scores across the board, but specifically the

measure ‘is modern/of today’.

z Increase awareness of Yellow Pages’ online and mobile

products and improve brand tracking scores: ‘ There is

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