Yellow Pages: Tree House restaurant

Advertising Agency: Aim Proximity, Auckland, New Zealand
2nd Advertising Agency: Colenso BBDO Auckland, New Zealand
Executive Creative Director: Nick Worthington, Colenso BBDO
Creative Director: Steve Cochran, Colenso BBDO
Creative Director: Dave King, AIM Proximity
Deputy Creative Director: Tony Clewett, AIM Proximity
Head Of Interactive Art: Aaron Goldring, AIM Proximity
Art Director: Maria Lishman, Colenso BBDO
Copywriter: Anne Boothroyd, Colenso BBDO
Digital Designer: Simon Redwood, Colenso BBDO
Digital Designer: Ed Hackney, AIM Proximity
Senior Digital Designer: Shanan Goldring, AIM Proximity
Web Developers: Robin Southgate, Cameron Crosby, Bruno Imbrizi, AIM Proximity
Group Account Director: Matt Pickering
Senior Account Manager: Victoria Pether
Account Director: Ngaio Pardon
Account Manager: Karen Boulton, AIM Proximity
Account Executive: Krystel Houghton, Colenso BBDO
TV Producer: Nigel Sutton, Colenso BBDO
Planner: James Hurman, Colenso BBDO

Brief:
In New Zealand, the Yellow Pages was seen as an old fashioned book that was no longer the best place for people to find businesses. New online directories such as Google were gaining dominance. As a result of this perception, Yellow was finding it increasingly difficult to sell listings in their books. Our brief was to show that Yellow is still the best place in New Zealand to find every business you need.

Creative Execution:
This wasn’t a metaphor or a nice warm fuzzy ad with great special effects. This was a single minded product demonstration. Using Yellow and nothing but Yellow was at the core of it. Every business, service and product needed to build the restaurant was found using Yellow. The businesses who helped were featured and there was a link on the site back to their business. It proved to the public that you can get any job done using Yellow and proved to businesses that it pays to be in Yellow. And we got to build something really amazing.

Creative Solution:
Show that you can get any job done using nothing but Yellow. But we knew that building a birdbath or a garage wouldn’t make people take notice. We needed a project that would capture people’s imagination and prove that you can complete the toughest job using nothing but Yellow. So what was the job? We decided to build a restaurant. 10 metres up a redwood tree. In just 66 days. And via DR TV, Radio, Print, Billboards, DM, Banners and our website, we got people all over New Zealand and around the world following our progress.

Results:
Our yellowtreehouse.co.nz site attracted over 221,000 visitors, each spending an average of five minutes. Over 2,000 people dined at the restaurant. A further 2,000 tried but missed out. Unprompted recall of Yellow increased by 37%. Sales in Regional Yellow Pages Directories increased 6.7% year-on-year, with the highest increasing by 19%. (Across the board, sales in print directories are declining internationally). Yellow online usage increased by 11% to a record 1.02 million per month in November. Yellow book usage increased by 9.2%. The free media coverage this generated in NZ was worth over $3.5 million.