Whoever said radio was a dead ad medium never had their phone dialed by a radio spot. Can a print ad make dinner reservations? I don't think so.
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.