The Yellow Tree House is part of a campaign promoting Yellow’s business directory search – via book, website or mobile phone. Aucklander Tracey Collins was challenged to build a restaurant halfway up a redwood tree, using nothing but contacts from Yellow’s book, website and mobile application. Her progress was publicly followed and, in January 2009, the Tree House Restaurant opened to a sell-out two-month season.

The campaign drew unprecedented media attention, featuring in 90 different magazines, all the main TV news channels and was even the lead story on the front page of The New Zealand Herald. However its biggest impact was online. The campaign truly went viral. It featured on over 200,000 web pages as consumers distributed the campaign around the web, taking on the role of traditional media.

The Tree House unlocked the secret to ‘viral’ success online by creating and disseminating highly compelling content in a myriad of forms, from a live webcam and daily blog, to image galleries and webisodes.

As a consequence, yellow.co.nz’s monthly unique visitors rose above one million for the first time ever. Usage grew by 11% (against an objective of 5%) and recall by 10%, and did so three times more cost effectively than any previous campaign – and with a smaller campaign budget. Amongst those who recalled the campaign, the perception of Yellow’s ‘internet leadership’ jumped 10%.