The objective of the promotional campaign was to make both new and existing customers aware of the new CAPITAL headphone series, launched with the campaign claim of “MAKE THE CITY SOUND BETTER”.

The UK is a key market and especially the London Apple Stores are an important part of AIAIAIs distribution platform, so the aim was to generate sales, local and international awareness and also strong buzz in close proximity to the retail locations.

The strategy was to make something that could engage the core target group as well as the general public of London.

Together with a japanese sound artist, AIAIAI completely remade an iconic black London cab into the: “The Sound Taxi”.

A cross between – a live event, promotion and quite literally a piece of ambient outdoor advertising.

It took tours of different parts of London, with a variety of passengers consisting of online competition winners, journalists and random Londoners.

The sound taxi worked like this: it is equipped with a microphone that records the surrounding noise. Specially designed software, then analyses the frequencies of these noises and uses them to generate unique music in real-time.

The project not only made people look, interact, talk, smile, take photographs, tweet – and listen, it also became one of the main news stories of the day. Featured in a big variety of media. From an Evening Standard newspaper feature, a BBC radio interview, to trendsetting UK sites, as well as leading international tech blogs and local news-media.

All in all, the project had 350.000 interactions from consumers, listening and downloading, liking the content and seeing the video, and in total more than 25.000.000 media impressions from the vast amount of editorial coverage.

A solid ROI of the £15.000 budget.

Sound and music is where it all starts and ends for a headphone company.

So people passing by the Sound Taxi would hear the music through the 67 speakers and was given the opportunity to tune-in to the converted sounds via the headphones installed inside of the vehicle, that had a pick-up point next to the Covent Garden Apple Store.

Also flyers were handed out, with information on the product and the project, QR code and url leading to the campaignsite makethecitysoundbetter.com where the musical creations from each tour, was uploaded for download and listening purposes.