More Music You Love

Background

Jacaranda FM wanted to attract more listeners to the station by bringing their new #MoreMusicYouLove proposition to life.

Idea

Over five days, Jacaranda DJs created a radio drama with the help of their listeners, a love story centred around a young couple. Listeners called in and voted on social media for the direction the story should take. On the last day, car drivers in Johannesburg were targeted directly as they drove to work in the rush-hour traffic.

A digital billboard live-streamed actors and celebrities lip-synching to the station's music as it was playing out through drivers' car radios.

To become participants in the activation, drivers had to switch radio channels when they would see the characters on the billboard perfectly matched as they sang along with the music playing over their car radios.

The whole experience was filmed and broadcast via a live social media feed, adding to the hype and maximising the reach of the event.

To achieve this required setting up an outside broadcast unit with the Jacaranda breakfast team on location. This allowed the performers to receive a real-time playback of the songs to lip sync to, which the cameras captured. The analog radio feed was then sent back to the station, 40km away. Meanwhile, The live camera feed was put through a digital signal delay to lag the footage just enough to allow the analog FM signal to travel back inside people's cars to ensure the live lip sync on the billboard was perfect.

You can see the "making of" video here

Results

The campaign reminded people how good it feels to sing along to music you love.

Based in Pretoria, Jacaranda FM was a little off the radar of Johannesburg-based clients and their agencies. The idea was to drive media sales as well as gain new listeners.

While the campaign cost $80,000, it generated almost $1.1m in earned media at an estimated ROI of 1 to13.75.

Visitors to Jacaranda FM's website went up by 235% to 660,000.

Radio sales exceeded all targets, jumping 64% from the month the campaign launched to the month afterwards.

Listener numbers increased too, making Jacaranda FM the Number One commercial radio station in Gauteng.

Our Thoughts

Such an easy to idea to have, not so easy to make it work. But full credit to the team for getting the right message to the right people at exactly the right time.

There is a lot of attention these days to 'moments that matter'. But here's an idea that reaches people in a moment that doesn't matter. It's dead time when you sit in a jam going nowhere fast. Being invited to sing along in sync with both your radio and the characters up on the billboard must have broken through the torpor and created a real impression.

Glad to see this campaign winning awards both within and beyond South Africa.