Situation: The portable speaker category in the UAE is ruled by big-name brands with bigger media budgets and flagship stores at all major shopping malls and electronic sites online. Giving their products massive reach and keeping it top-of-mind for customers.

Brief: Sound On, a local homegrown brand in the UAE, wanted to launch its own range of waterproof portable speakers and acquire its own share-of-market. But with a tiny budget we knew we would never be noticed.

Objectives: We needed to work with a budget that afforded us only a small social media campaign and generate enough buzz online for people to notice us and drive traffic to our

e-commerce website which was the main channel for sales other than Amazon.

The Sound On R101 is a waterproof speaker. But so are most speakers from well-known brands. So, we decided to launch our speaker with an ‘immersive’ experience unlike any other.

We created The Waterproof Playlist: the world’s first underwater playlist that has been precisely designed to relax pet fish, and to prove the waterproof capabilities of the Sound On R101 portable speaker, we immersed it in a fish tank for everyone to enjoy. This experience was launched on the Sound On website as a homescreen takeover which provided customers with an experiential audio switch that let them toggle between 'human' mode and 'fish' mode.

All 8 songs were specially composed at a frequency between 40Hz – 100Hz which provide a soothing environment for fish. Produced by Sound Professor, Zubin Aroz, from the SAE Institute Dubai, the music arrangement of each track was made to create a perfect harmony for fish.

Fish in the Middle East are the most common house pets especially among the locals as the Muslim faith forbids the contact of saliva from more popular domestic pets such as cats and dogs.

Partnering with top music streaming platforms including Spotify, Anghami, Sound Cloud and YouTube the playlist was launched as a ‘Recommended playlist’ to target young adults in the UAE.

We also used a scaled down programmatic campaign to target people shopping for portable speakers on popular e-commerce sites like Amazon. Driving them to the Sound On website.

In addition, we used a small, sponsored campaign to release one song from the playlist every day on Sound On’s Instagram channel pushing people to the brand’s e-commerce website for a truly unique and immersive experience which provided potential customers with an experiential audio switch that let them hear each song at normal sound levels or as fish would.

Implementation: The campaign was rolled out across Instagram and Facebook. Our audience was targeted with 5 Instagram Reels which revealed the idea one song at a time. On each post, the a "Listen Now" CTA redirected them to our website where they could listen to the entire playlist while also being able to toggle between a ‘Human mode’ and a ‘Fish mode’.

Timeline: The campaign was launched across Instagram and Facebook on January 13, 2023.

Placement: The awareness phase the Waterproof Playlist was rolled out as a sponsored campaign on Instagram & Facebook. We also used paid partnerships with top music streaming platforms including Spotify, Anghami, Sound Cloud and YouTube to feature the playlist as a ‘Recommended playlist’ or ‘Editor’s pick’.

Scale: With a budget of only US$20,000 we were able to implement and execute the entire launch phase of the campaign which also included the composing the tracks.

Within a month of launching the campaign from January 13, 2023 we were able to record

+300K unique listeners from data on the Sound On website and YouTube alone.

We also recorded +250K downloads of the Waterproof Playlist from the Sound On website

The Waterproof Playlist led to a 193% jump in sales of the Sound On R101 speaker and other Sound On accessories.

The brand also featured as "Amazon's Best Choice" as ratings for the speaker started climbing exponentially since its launch.