Twitter billboard a New Zealand first

Three new digital billboards displaying live ‘tweets’ from Josh, the face of Yellow’s latest advertising campaign ‘Yellow Chocolate’, are a New Zealand first. 

The billboards are the first of their kind in New Zealand to combine social media sensation Twitter™ with an integrated advertising campaign, and incorporate technology traditionally used to update sports scoreboards and digital road signs.

Josh is one month into a project to develop and market a chocolate bar that tastes like the colour yellow, using only products and services in Yellow’s books, online and mobile.

To date his regular tweet updates have been available to those that follow Twitter, however from Monday (1 9 October) they will be posted live to billboards in Auckland and Wellington.

Yellow’s Kellie Nathan says the Twitter billboard is an appropriate tool for a company that is increasingly looking to the online and mobile spaces for growth opportunities.

“Innovation is a core value for Yellow and launching New Zealand’s first live Twitter billboard shows that we are responding to the way people now consume media.

“We’re very much living in a digital world and our aim is to ensure our content is available to people where they want it, when they want it and how they want it. Josh’s journey to create a yellow tasting chocolate bar has received incredible support in the online space, with more than 12,700 fans on Facebook, so the billboard seemed like a natural next step.”

Ms Nathan says both the Yellow chocolate bar and last year’s Yellow treehouse campaign demonstrated the sheer range of information available through Yellow. While the projects’ outcomes were extraordinary, the products and services used to create them were just the sort of things ordinary Kiwis went looking for every day.

"Both the treehouse and the chocolate campaigns follow a real person carrying out a realistic series of tasks to achieve a fantastic result.”

The public can catch Josh’s tweets on billboards on Auckland’s Queen Street, at the corner of Onslow Road and Sandringham Road in Kingsland, or on Wellington’s Waterloo Quay. Others can follow Josh online at yellowchocolate.co.nz

APN Outdoor and Signopsys are the technology geniuses behind New Zealand’s first ever Twitter billboard, and Yellow’s media partners Colenso, Aim Proximity and Starcom worked together to create it.