Nodal Bits

YPA’s Stephanie Hobbs wrote an article for this week’s Locals Only column at Search Engine Land, and in it she used the recent Hidden Pizza marketing campaign for the Australian Yellow Pages as an example of why local businesses need to take a multi-platform approach to modern advertising. However, Ed Kohler, outspoken critic of yellow pages advertising, took exception to the article in both the comments and on his blog, calling it a “rigged study”.

I earlier critiqued the Hidden Pizza yellow pages campaign myself, finding it unlikely to change consumer behavior, and it may’ve actually pushed consumers in the other direction (away from using yellow pages), if it had any longterm effect on their behavior at all.

Still, I think Ed’s reaction to the SEL article is an overreaction — Stephanie never called the Hidden Pizza campaign a “case study” at all, and she didn’t use it to say that yellow pages alone drove consumers to the restaurant.

My interpretation of the original aim of the Sensis marketing campaign was that they intended to use it to try to win back the hip, modern, young consumer demographic who have forgotten the worth (in yellow pages companies’ eyes at least) of the yellow pages. They were trying very hard to make the Yellow Pages “cool” again.

In some sense, the campaign was a success, because they did indeed get the attention of the younger demographic, and got them engaged. They can point to the numbers of people who looked at the yellow pages entry for the restaurant, and to the numbers who attended the restaurant to get free grub. They can also tout this an overall PR success, since it got so much worldwide attention, and lured so many of us to write about it.

But, my suspicion is that after the original “secret” of the location got out, it was likely transmitted more through word-of-mouth and social media than through yellow pages look-ups. As I pointed out, one of those engaged consumers tried to helpfully correct the problem by adding the restaurant listing to Urbanspoon. Further, I think quite a few people had to be lead to go to the yellow pages, and most of them likely went to the internet yellow pages site for Sensis.

So, my take was that this likely wasn’t the unqualified success story that it was made out to be — I suspect that all those consumers returned to their normal/preferred routines after the campaign, and it likely won’t result in expanding YP loyalty.

Ed’s right in the sense that this tried to push consumers into behaviors unnatural to themselves. If it was a case study, yes, it’d be wrong to cite it as an example of how successful yellow pages are.

Now, Stephanie did try to coopt the campaign and use it as a bit of an example, but she said straight out that consumers look for business info across a wide variety of channels. Her conclusion was that businesses should advertise through multiple platforms, and that yellow pages — both print and online — should be components of the overall whole.

Finally, Ed takes SEL itself to task for reproducing the article. However, this is not particularly fair — SEL provides a platform for reporting upon search industry and marketing news, and they have a number of columns where various non-journalists write articles which are often editorial pieces. They state very clearly that these are of the writers’ opinions, and possibly not that of Search Engine Land itself.

So, while Stephanie clearly stretched a little to make this an example of how yellow pages should be a part of local marketing efforts, she didn’t call it a case study nor present it as a scientific, double-blind, test for whether yellow pages works by itself. Ed is right that this was very unrepresentative of those consumers’ normal behaviors, and if it was a case study it would be terribly stilted for forcing an unnatural scenario. The people who originally created the campaign were trying to promote use of yellow pages, online and print, to a demographic that has migrated away from the traditional directories. Will this be successful, long-term? I don’t think so, but it was a pretty interesting idea.

Tags: ad campaigns, ads, guerrilla marketing, marketing, marketing campaigns, word of mouth marketing, Yellow Pages

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 10:44 am and is filed under General Commentary, Yellow Pages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.