The Tree House Restaurant
Yellow
Issue 10 | March 2009
Agency
Aim Proximity/Colenso BBDO
Creative Team
Nick Worthington – Executive Creative Director; Dave King, Steve Cochran – Creative Directors; Steve Cochran, Dave King, Tony Clewett, Aaron Goldring, Anne Boothroyd, Maria Lishman – Creative team ; Simon Redwood Shanan Goldring, Ed Hackney - Designers
Production Team
Paul Courtney, Amanda Theobald, Tali Rose - Production; Nigel Sutton - TV Producer; Robin Southgate, Cameron Crosby, Bruno Imbrizi - Web Developers
Other Credits
Matthew Pickering, Ngaio Pardon, Victoria Pether, Karen Boulton, Krystel Houghton – Account Management
Date
October 2008 - ongoing
Background
In New Zealand, Yellow Pages is seen as an old fashioned book that is no longer the best place to track and find businesses. The brief for AIM Proximity and Colenso BBDO was to change this view.
Idea
The agency wanted to show that just about any job you can think of can be sorted using nothing but Yellow. But no-one was going to be really interested in having a bird-bath built or a garden gazebo constructed. They had to come up with a project that would capture people’s imagination and show that even the toughest tasks could be accomplished using only Yellow. So what was that job?
They opted to build a restaurant. In a tree. 10 metres up. In a remote redwood forest. They hired Tracey Collins to see the job through from ‘whoa to go’. Starting on 22 October 2008, the project went from nothing to one of the world’s most beautiful restaurants in 66 days. And via TV ads, billboards, banners and a website, where there was webcam footage of the restaurant taking shape as well as Tracey’s blog, people in New Zealand and right around the world followed its progress from dream to opening day.
Results
The idea provided a showcase for over 50 New Zealand businesses found in Yellow. Unprompted recall of Yellow increased from 27% in 2007 to 37% in 2008. The advertising spend required for each percentage point was dramatically less than last year’s campaign. The site received more than 160,000 visitors, 125,000 of them unique. The average time on the site was almost five minutes. Tens of thousands of websites blogged about it, from Kanye West to the Times of London. Over 50 international magazines took up the story. It was covered by each of the major New Zealand news outlets as well as television channels in Korea, Germany and the UK. And it highlighted to everyone who saw it, that even the most impossible tasks can be undertaken successfully using nothing but Yellow.
Our Thoughts
If you go to www.yellowtreehouse.co.nz and look at the video diary, there’s one bit where you can see a man waving at the camera from the restaurant. That’s the mad bastard behind this idea, Dave King. He and his team at AIM Proximity were on fire in 2008, winning big gongs at the Caples, the ECHOs and all the rest with mould-breaking ideas like ‘iPhone Jonny’ for Yellow Pages and ‘Valentine’s Day’ for The Warehouse. It looks as if they’ll be doing much the same in 2009 if they keep producing work like this. It is a brilliant example of a brand being relevant, useful, interesting and human rather than just telling people it is these things.