Concept
 Sky Radio became the first station in the Netherlands to integrate the music recognition service Shazam into interactive radio advertising, with a campaign for Bavaria Beer. By creating a direct point of contact between the listener and the brand, Bavaria’s consumers were just a single tap away from participating in a competition and finding out more information about the product.
This innovative and effective collaboration between Sky Radio and Shazam also involved the agency Mindshare and smartclip, a digital advertising platform that represents Shazam. The use of the music recognition platform, which has also been used to good effect with TV campaigns, offers a great way to encourage increased listener attention to radio commercials.
 The concept is simple. By Shazam-ing the Bavaria radio commercial when it came on air, listeners could enter a competition to win a holiday via the specially created Bavaria Island campaign website. Sky Radio’s website and social media announced the times of day the spot could be heard.
The Bavaria commercial was tagged nearly 7,000 times (by 3,874 unique users) on Shazam in a single week.
A similar commercial for the singer Jason Mraz also allowed listeners to tag one of his songs, generating 6,621 tags by 4,000 unique users in 5 days. On this occasion, the Shazam app allowed participants to access a competition to win tickets to the artist’s concerts and to purchase his album on iTunes.
Koen Aartman, Account Manager Sky Radio Group: “Bavaria and the Sky Radio Group are very pleased to see a higher recognition of the campaign, researched by GFK. A remarkable fact is that 60% of the contestants are in the age of 20 – 34 years (the main target group for Bavaria), whilst with a normal campaign this target group generates 20% of the contestants. For both campaigns it was important to activate the listeners; these campaigns succeeded with this and allowed users to be followed up via opt-in.”
Sky Radio Group plans to use this tool again in the future: the broadcaster is building another marketing campaign on the station Radio Veronica around the band Nickelback. This campaign is expected to launch in September.
Why does this matter to egta members?
 Interactivity using sound recognition apps, such as Shazam – which has been deployed in a number of European markets – is an opportunity to enhance the relationship between station, brand and listener by putting information about products, simple access to contest participation, online purchase, etc. within a single click on a smartphone or tablet.
Listeners are given a great reason to pay higher attention to radio commercials, increasing the value of advertising over the medium.
The possibility of immediate engagement or purchase makes this concept particularly interesting for e-commerce advertisers or when used by more traditional clients in conjunction with competition participation. It also brings a direct response feature to radio advertising, offering a similar mechanism to interactive online ad formats.
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