The Challenge
Build brand awareness with targeted Spotify audio advertising for VU Online’s Customer Centric digital services.
What was our role?
Who are we?
We’re VU. We bring customers to you.
And from time to time a new digital service comes along that might be right for you, the Spotify advertising platform piqued our curiosity, so we set about trialling it with a goal to design a concept that’s easily extendable for future ads for different services in different markets, that’s engaging and not too serious.
All good agencies eat dog food
Feels right, we like it, we believe in it, no else does it, so we did it.
Having a creative team at the VU office and a production facility made for a fun and easy job. The team wanted something irreverent and light-hearted so we got stuck in, became our own clients and tried for something simple with character.
Dogfooding is an excellent way to try stuff out.
The Solution
The creatives worked in the studio using improvisation techniques around a loose scripted core message and theme.
Chicken on a skateboard
No agency in our region does audio advertising work so we are pioneering this one ourselves.
Armed with a few creative ideas, VU embarked on promoting their services with the “Dear Barney” campaign: a series of three 30s audio ads scheduled to playout on Spotify over a few months starting with “Chicken on a Skateboard”.
The 30s Logic Pro session for “Chicken on a Skateboard”
“Love it!”
Helen Bailey
Business Development Manager, Newfox
We follow a structured format and narrative. This is to build production consistency, brand consistency and furnish the campaign with a certain identifiable character that listeners will come to recognise during the campaign across multiple ads throughout the campaign.
Each ad uses the same brand identity playout, Call to Action and is written with light-hearted empathy for the challenges business owners and marketing professionals face. Slightly irreverent and mildly amusing with a character and personality to make it memorable.
Each ad begins with a fictional Marketing person emailing the long suffering Barney with his latest “thoughts” on Digital Marketing. We go on to present the VU narrative and finish with the Call to Action:
“Tap on the banner to find out more. We’re VU. We bring customers to you.”
The VU audio production studio for Spotify Audio Advertising
The adverts were scripted and recorded at VU’s facility, mastered and added to the VU Spotify advertising platform. There, VU set a campaign budget, estimated target audience based on recent customer workshops, and scheduled the campaigns to run for a specified window across our target demographic audience in south Devon.
Part of the brief was to build click-through campaign landing pages for each advert to convert new customers for the service offering. Each page explains the service VU is promoting and provides a method of contact.
To date VU have reached nearly 8000 individuals in the target demographic with multiple plays of the advert. VU hope it’s made an impression.
A capture of Spotify data for “Chicken on a Skateboard” showing over 18,000 plays across South Devon in a 3 week period
Have A Listen, see what you think
Results
18,154
Ads Served
7,716
People Listened
£0.01
Cost Per Play
£4.19
Cost Per Click
In conclusion, we think this has its place in a modern marketing campaign somewhere between the targeted demographics of social media advertising and the broad reach of offline radio advertising that has been around for years.
It is more targeted and measurable than radio, however, less focussed on an audience searching for you or your products like google adwords.
We have created a new service offering, at the same time raised brand awareness as well as had some fun along the way.
Do you know anyone who may be interested in this project?
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