We are all familiar with the excellent TV work the brand has produced over the years, from JR Hartley to its latest 'hero', James Nesbitt. This long-running and much-loved campaign has concentrated mainly on the core values of Yellow Pages: helpful, local and relevant. We may, however, not be aware of two new services the company now offers: 118 247, its directory enquiries service, and Yellow Pages Late Night London, which details everything you would need to survive and enjoy late-night London life.
Not surprisingly, Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO has drawn strength from its TV work and kept Nesbitt as brand spokesman in a series of radio ads, featuring him in a number of humorous scenarios where he needs answers - and he needs them fast.
As well as complementing the TV work, the Yellow Pages radio ads deliver clear campaign messages of their own. And while humour can be a dangerous route when adapting from existing TV work (all too often it fails in translation to radio), in this instance it works brilliantly and a smile begins to appear as soon as you hear Nesbitt's voice. Tonally, the message is not lost at the expense of this humour, and the listener's interest is maintained by the number of different creative treatments involved in the campaign.
In short, this campaign plays to all the medium's strengths. It delivers the local coverage required for the individual editions (as in the case of Late Night London), it delivers frequency to keep the message in listeners' minds, and it can talk to different target audiences in relevant environments by weighting the impacts into different time bands, thereby meeting the need to reach small /local businesses as well as the general customer. This is a great campaign that deserves to succeed.
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