Yellow Pages, we have all heard of it before and in most households you will find, hidden in a cupboard somewhere, the large, yellow book. But the outlook for Yellow Pages is not good........
In an attempt to increase the number of people using Yellow Pages, and therefore to encourage businesses that they should advertise with Yellow Pages, they created a new advertising campaign “Hidden Pizza Case Study”. This campaign involved creating a pizza restaurant that was hidden in a basement, and then placed advertisements only in the Yellow Pages challenging people to find the restaurant. If they found the restaurant, they would get a free pizza. In two weeks, the hidden pizza restaurant received 8,521 calls, with 71% of the calls coming from Yellow Pages searches.
The idea behind the campaign is great – show businesses how advertising in the Yellow Pages will increase the number of customers. It has one main flaw though; the number of people actually using the yellow pages is decreasing.
When was the last time you opened that big yellow book to search for a business? For me it would have been years ago. And the Yellow Pages website? With increasing usage of the internet, it is more likely that people will use the website over the hard copy. What discourages me to use the website though is the lack of relevant search results that you get when you search. For example, when I searched for "Plumber, Brighton 3186 Vic" results of plumbers from Mt Waverly, Ringwood, Templestowe came up - THESE ARE NOT BRIGHTON PLUMBERS!! I did get some results that are actually in Brighton, however a lot of the search results are plumbers that 'service’ the Brighton area.
So will this new advertising campaign work? I don’t think so. With less people actually using the yellow pages, why would businesses spend the money to advertise in it? Businesses are better of trying to increase search result hits with search engines such as Google than using the Yellow Pages.
What do other people think? Is there any hope for Yellow Pages? Does anyone prefer using Yellow Pages to other search sites?
It's has been a year I got in touch with Yellow Page, it's sometimes fail me. As a student I personally looking for good services with reasonable price. However, any business that spend money on advertising on YP, I reckon the price for its services is not that desirable!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the campaign was pretty interesting and attractive, no wonder there will be an increase in the number of users. But don't think it will last long especially Google Search is much faster and more efficient.
Great Post !
I still beleive the Hidden Pizza campaign is bogus. They are claiming that Yellow Pages works because 70% of people used YP to find the Hidden Pizza joint. But of course they did, because that's the only place that they advertised (and of course they were giving away something for free!).
ReplyDeleteI publicly criticised Sensis about their campaign on their Facebook page recently - you can read the full thread here. To their credit, they left my comments, and responded appropriately, and politely.
What do others think about my comments on FB?