OK this may be the coolest new advertising idea I’ve heard in a while. As you can tell from last week’s comment about a recent AT&T ad I’m fairly jaded about commercials. Too many are boring, badly thought out, poorly executed or simply have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing. Which is what makes this idea so great. Plus it’s a completely new approach for a tried and true medium.
A hotel with a restaurant in Amsterdam wanted to do two things - they wanted to raise their visibility and increase the number of reservations at the restaurant. So they turned to radio and used the particular strengths of the medium to make it work. The concept is simple. They take the work out of making a reservation at the restaurant for you - this is the part I love - by dialing the phone for you with the radio ad! Oh yes they do! All you have to do is hold your landline phone up to the speaker of the radio while the ad plays and they will make your phone dial the reservation number of the Hotel Arena in Amsterdam. No tricks, it really works and it’s incredibly simple. They include the DTMF (that’s dual tone multi frequency) tones right in that ad. Those are the beeps you hear from any modern phone. Way back in the day (we’re talking 30 or 40 years ago)this was cutting edge hacker technology. People could make pay phones dial calls for free using the same basic technique. It was called phone phreaking.
What I love about this ad is, well, pretty much everything. It’s something you’ve never heard before. It’s guaranteed to generate talk about the spot and the advertiser. It’s interactive, you don’t just sit and listen to the advertisement you need to get up and get your phone to play along. And it’s inevitable that plenty of folks will do just that, JUST TO SEE IF IT REALLY WORKS! When it does that generates even more talk and early response seems to indicate that it did generate some more dinner reservations. So call it a success.
The only down side on this is that the tones won’t work with a cell phone. But you know what? When was the last time that the two old timers of electronic media managed to corner the cool factor all to themselves? The buzz created by the spot would be enough to overcome that small problem at least in the short run. It would be great if more advertising efforts showed this kind of out of the box thinking while still keeping focus on the primary goals.
Call that the View From the Phlipside.
"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY. You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010
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