P4 and Apollo – the sound of vacation

This is the story of how P4 made a spinoff-campaign on one of their most popular campaigns of all times, and how they engaged over 25 000 people in a little under eight weeks.

P4 is the biggest commercial radio station in Norway, with over 1,2M listeners. They wanted to create a campaign together with their advertiser Apollo to create engagement around summer and the summer vacation. The tagline of the radio station is “The Sound of Norway” and in collaboration with the travel agency Apollo they created the concept “the sound of vacation”.

“The sound of Norway” is also a campaign that P4 has 5 times every year. It’s their most successful campaign with around 10 000 participants every day, with over 400 000 participants in total the last time it ran. The concept is simple, but genius, they play a sound over the radio, and people try to guess what the sound really is by responding with a text to participate. Every day 4 attendees are picked randomly to receive a phone call and the chance to win between 50 000 and 200 000 in hard cash.

With around 10 000 texts being sent to listeners every day, P4 found it the perfect place to make a collaboration with one of their sponsors – Apollo. “The sound of vacation” was born.

P4 and 24SevenSocial created the idea that listeners would get a call to action in the SMS response they got when they participated in the main campaign (Sound of Norway). The link brought them to a mobile website built by us in 24SevenSocial. The goal was to brand Apollo as “the caribbean expert”, and grow their Facebook audience and their mailing list.

The campaign lasted for 7 weeks, with a new sound added every week. To let people know about The Sound of Vacation the following channels were used.

• The radio intro and outro of the main campaign (The sound of Norway) 4 times every day
• Banner ads on P4.no
• Sponsored stories on P4 Facebook page
• Apollo’s own Facebook page
• Viral reach via posts from participants and winners

All parties of this campaign are extremely happy with the campaign. The results are as follows.

• 400 000 SMS sent with Apollo mobile link
• 26 889 participants
• 6452 new e-mails on their mailing list
• Over 5000 new likes on their Facebook page

This is some key factors to why we think it was so successful.

• It was a natural part of the campaign, people were already in the “right mood” for competitions and winning stuff.
• They focused on collecting data, which could not have been done without using an app
• The campaign site was created to be fully responsive, so people via their phone got the best experience possible.
• Facebook share functionality was added where natural, so it actually felt natural to share
• It was a combination of paid channels and own channels used, to create maximum exposure in an cost effective way.

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