Simon Baptist's Posterous

A More Personal Collection

Yellow Pages and Free (Hidden) Pizza

Image002

 Recently, Sensis, the Yellow Pages for Australia, ran an interesting marketing campaign to show the relevancy of the Yellow Pages in the digital age.

In conjunction with a top Melbourne chef they opened a guerrilla/pop-up pizza restaurant for two weeks.  The trick was that the location was supposed to be kept a secret and if you could find it you would get a free pizza.  Or in their words:

Finding the restaurant is easy, just look it up the way you would any other business from April 12 – April 25 and the pizzas are free.

 Which when you read between the lines means:  find this Hidden Pizza restaurant on sensis.com.au – which Sensis reports 70% of customers did.  But as you can read from some of the deeper local analysis (links below) was because that was the only place (at first) where you could find the address.  I say at first because in the age of social engaged consumers it wasn’t long before the business details were being listed across various social media outlets (Foursquare, Twitter, Urban Spoon, etc.)

Sensis are calling this a success, it’s detractors are saying it’s a complete fail because they just don’t get that things have changed in the digital age and it’s a false positive.  My view is that the statistics, immediate outcome of the campaign aren’t the important thing here but the fact that Sensis have been able to generate global conversation on the back of a local campaign is.  I hope other traditional Yellow Page companies take note and we see other examples coming to a neighbourhood soon.

As a final note, don't bother searching on Yellow Pages for Hidden Pizza as it looks like Sensis have pulled the listing - that looks like a lost opportunity for further engagement to me.