To promote Jacaranda FM's new offering and bring “More Music You Love” to life we invited motorists to interact with a huge digital billboard that screened live performances perfectly synced to sing along with them and the music playing on their car radios by tuning in to Jacaranda FM and sampling the station. We set up an outside broadcast, on location, so the performers received real-time playback of the songs to lip sync to which our cameras captured. While the radio feed was sent back to the station, 40km away, the live camera feed was sent through a digital signal delay which lagged the footage just enough for the analog FM signal to travel back inside people’s cars and create the perfect synchronized live simulcast lip sync billboard experience. In the end, successfully demonstrating just how good it feels to sing along in your car to more music you love.

To showcase Jacaranda FM's new offering we had the morning show DJs create a radio drama with the help of their listeners over 5 days (leading up to the activation), where each day listeners voted via SMS and social media which direction the story would evolve. The concluding drama was then re-enacted on the 6th day and brought to life in the form of a live (musical lip sync) stage performance screened on a digital billboard, which was perfectly synced to sing along with the listeners and the music playing on their car radios. For maximum impact the final day of the activation played out on the corner of Corlett Drive and Oxford Road (a major intersection in Johannesburg with one of the biggest digital billboards in South Africa). The activation trended on twitter and was one of the most talked about media publicity stunts in the month of February.

While the campaign only cost our client $80,000 it generated almost $1.1m* in earned media across social media and other traditional news sites at a ratio of 13.75. Website visitors for the month of the campaign increased by 235%, from 280,000 unique visitors to 660,000. Radio media sales for the months of February, March and April all exceeded targets. As radio listenership figures are only released annually, the true business results are yet to be quantified.

This execution was a live activation event to promote the launch of Jacaranda FM's new “More Music You Love” offering. It was an interactive on the ground promotion, where the public where invited to sample and experience the station's new offering first hand by actively switching over to the station.

• The activation strategy was developed to create awareness around Jacaranda FM and their new “More Music You Love” offering, focusing on deepening affinity with existing listeners, as well as acquiring new listeners in the greater Johannesburg area (the area that falls within the station's new expanded FM signal range).

• The station's new campaign target audience profile was found to be multi-racial male and female radio listeners in Gauteng province between the age of 18 and 45, with a focus on motorists within the greater Johannesburg area.

• Our approach was simple: prompt active engagement from the desired (main) target audience and generate trial by bringing the radio station’s “More Music You Love” FM radio broadcast offering to life on another major media platform in a location where the core target audience can be found (stuck in their cars during peak hour morning traffic) at one of Johannesburg’s busiest intersections.

• After extensive research Jacaranda FM found South Africans wanted a radio station that aired less talk and more music, so they updated their offering accordingly.

• The brief was to launch and promote the radio station and its improved “More Music You Love” offering in a dynamic experiential way, worthy of generating social and media talkability/hype around the brand and its new “More Music You Love” offering.

• So we set out to develop a creative execution that showcased the station and its offering by bringing it to life on the street, in the exact place where majority of the station's target audience is (listening to their car radios) and literally show them how enjoyable listening to a station that offers “More Music You Love” can be.