Commentary
Hungry? This Radio Ad Dials Your Dinner Reservation
- by Amy Corr , Staff Writer @MediaPostOTL, May 3, 2010
Hotel Arena is a hotel with a restaurant, bar and nightclub in Amsterdam. The hotel wanted to increase bookings at its restaurant while creating awareness for the brand as a whole.
Agency THEY wanted to make it easy for people to make reservations. So they took the phone dialing out of the equation by making a radio spot that broadcasts DTMF (dual-tone multi-frequency), or tones that communicate a phone number to a landline phone.
The tone, in this case, connected listeners to Hotel Arena's restaurant, and the only thing listeners had to do was place their phone, with dial tone present, in front of the radio speaker. Check out a tutorial here.
"When this Hotel Arena job came up, we thought, how can we make a radio spot interactive," said Dylan Berg at THEY. "Could we actually use the energy of the radio waves themselves to make something happen? One of our guys is also a DJ and one night he discovered a DTMF generator. He realized it worked just like old dial-up modems, where the number was 'dialed' only by sound. Bingo! Why only tell people to call for a reservation, when you can actually dial the phone for them."
DTMF technology is rather simple to use when converting telephone numbers into DTMF tones. You enter the phone number and it spits out the tones.
Adding the DTMF tones to the
radio spots added no additional cost to the campaign, since it's essentially just sound across airwaves.
The campaign certainly suits lazy people. Let's hope that someone too tired to dial the phone to make reservations has enough energy to actually leave the house and eat that dinner.
Amy Corr is managing editor, online newsletters for MediaPost. She can be reached at amyc@mediapost.com.
Brilliant! An idea that was right there in front of everyone and nobody had done it. By the way... you have a "DTMF Generator". We just call it a "phone".
Phone numbers in radio ads are pretty much a waste of expensive airtime. In a :30 ad of about 80 words, giving a phone number, which in most areas now includes area code, eats up ten words. Repeating it, you're up to 20 words or 25% of your copy. That's 25% less selling time to put in a phone number very few people will be able to write down or remember.
Now, if you're doing a :60 or longer direct response ad, then a phone number can work. Mention the number near the top of the ad, and repeat twice more at the end. A listener that hears a phone number near the beginning of an ad that attracts his/her attention will probably assume the number will be repeated, which can lead to closer attention to the ad's pitch.
DTMF tones are a clever way to get attention for an ad, but not the most practical way to get someone to place a call for a reservation. Directing listeners to a web site with a memorable name makes the most sense. Drive listeners to your web site, where you can continue to sell them and provide detailed contact info. This cross-channel selling is going on with print media and web sites. No reason not to do the same with radio and web sites.