SPT Marketing news

‘Hidden Pizza’

All entering business needs publicity to help its product and service as well as the whole business to be known in the market. However, several years ago a new pizza restaurant in Melbourne managed to get publicity with no traditional advertising and promotion.

You are probably doubting how a business can publicize itself without the well-known advertising strategies. You will be more than surprised with the answer which is simple and can be applied to all businesses regardless of their profiles.

Instead of the traditional advertising and promotion, the social media scene was used as a main advertising channel which resulted in a lot of online chatter, word-of-mouth and big lines stretching down the street within days of opening. The whole promotion of the ‘Hidden Pizza’ restaurant run by Yellow Pages directory service which aim was to highlight the value of Yellow Pages to small businesses.

The ‘Hidden Pizza’ was not like every other restaurant. It offered a pizza for free however its location was largely kept secret. The challenge for people in the ‘Hidden Pizza’ campaign was to find the phone number of the restaurant in order to be able to call, find out the location and visit to get free pizza. The only place the contact details of the restaurant was officially published was on the Yellow Pages website.

During the two weeks of promotion, the restaurant received more than 8000 calls. More than 6000 callers found the contact details online and the rest in other ways such as word-of-mouth, emails, blogs, text and social media.

This campaign is a typical example of the significance and effectiveness of social media which enabled more than 8000 people within two weeks to find the restaurant. Apparently, traditional advertising and promotions plays an important role to boost businesses however marketing strategies cannot be limited to the traditional ones only. In contemporary society, social media is part of the everyday life therefore sticking to traditional ones may let businesses down by losing the opportunity to catch a significant part of its target market.