A video of the Hidden Pizza Case Study that I blogged about earlier.

There is a contagious viral WOM-cum-social-media-marketing going on in Melbourne. And it involves free pizzas, and free lemonades in old jam jars.

And the mystery is one thing that has piqued many’s curiosities. Each person is allowed 1 free pizza each day for 14 days, until April 24. The catch is customers must track down the pizza shop’s location themselves.

There’s a Facebook page, lots of ”have-you-tried?” tweets tagged with hashtag #hidden pizza and a sophisticated website, but no address or phone number. A note on the website tells would-be customers that ‘‘finding the restaurant is easy, just look it up the way you would any other business”.

But that doesn’t mean Googling, but through the good old-fashioned Yellow Pages website. Once you locate the pizza place, you gotta leave you phone number with an operator and sign a release form , allowing organisers to photograph and film you.

Once mandatories are done – proceed to the underground restaurant that is mostly decorated with recycling materials, for your freebies. Oh, how environmentally-friendly is this campaign.

(Via berrytravels)

Despite many bloggers revealing the directions/locations online and ruin the secrecy of it all, may still resort to using Yellow Pages –> which only means this is a successful campaign IF the client is no other than Yellow Pages themselves.

Inquiries to both OMD and Clemenger were redirected to a publicist who insisted the pizza giveaway was a genuine marketing campaign for a new restaurant with long-term ambitions (ya right, IMO). Other sources, however, have confirmed that the entire enterprise was built with a lifespan of just two weeks with the sole reason of demonstrating the power of relationship marketing.

But whatever/whoever is driving this campaign that is commissioned by relationship marketing specialists Clemenger Proximity in collaboration with ad agency OMD, it’s apparently working. Ever since the campaign is launched, Hidden Pizza has been serving 500 pizzas a night, and online exposure has been rocketed to a sky high.

Even competitor Crust Pizza’s highly successful ‘Free Pizza Friday’ promotion that has netted the fast-growing company over 2,000 Facebook ‘Fans’ and 1,800 followers on Twitter lose out to the new-kid-on-the-block. It only took Hidden Pizza just three days to net roughly the same amount of online supporters.

They will soon unveil how visitors to the restaurant can view footage of themselves and then tag it on Facebook – a brilliant way of using the primitive functions of FB to create a viral effect.

Clever use of mysterious elements paired with gastronomical food – you get umpteen food and culture bloggers raving with no extra charges (no Nuffnang in between to charge unnecessary commission).

In my humble opinion, despite some critics penalizing the mechanics of the campaign and criticising it for not being truthful (some alleged that there was some serious astroturfing (pretending to be an average consumer online and posting positive comments about a product, when they actually work for, or on behalf of, the business in question)), I believe this campaign has already achieved its goal of generating enough (positive) awareness. But I can’t judge as yet, since my reading of this campaign is still relatively limited.

But whatever it is,  if you’re in Melby now, what are you waiting for! Grab your free food. Seriously no harm right?

Until 24 Apr.

(After some further reading  –> this may actually be a badly-excecuted campaign?)