Radio GaGa

Imagine sitting in a programming meeting that goes like this …

“OK folks, we need to run a station promotion. We need it to build hours and get people talking ….”

£1000 minute? Triple Play?

“Ah – been there, done that. Any more ideas?”

What about a fugative?

“It’s a great idea to get hours built this quarter – but how can we make it relate to our audience, strengthen our social media engagement and also help amplify our music proposition?”

Silly management talk aside … Step forward … Radio Ga Ga ..

No .. not Freddie. I’m talking about the latest station promotion that’s about to hit the radio waves of Tyneside.

We’ve been consuming a lot of competitive radio in the office this week and one day I was listening to Metro Radio and between Rihanna, The Wanted and Black Eyed Peas came this piece of audio; broadcasting it’s way down to London via the Radioplayer.

Take a listen ….

From next week – Metro Radio will be going Radio GaGa, which in the basic sense is a daily fugative competition to find a Lady GaGa character in the TSA to win £500 cash.

Over a period of two weeks – Metro Radio will do a Lady GaGa stunt in a different part of the TSA each day. Listeners need to identify one of the four locations each day and one winner will walk away with £500 each day during the Home Run show. Facebook, Twitter and online will be used as clues to help listeners find the stunt and walk away with the cash. A simple, yet highly effective mechanic. After all .. everyone loves the chance to win cash!

However, what impressed me was the level of detail in the “tease” element of the campaign both on air, off air and in the social and digital space. You can hear from the audio above that they’ve created ‘mock’ news stories on air about Lady Ga Ga in the TSA. Even more clever – Lady GaGa has been spotted at the local college who’re incidentally sponsoring the campaign (VERY NICE TOUCH!). Already creating a buzz with the sponsors but also with groups of young people who can start to push the promotion and the station activity virally amongst their digital own social networks and their real life social networks (don’t forget – people still speak in the playground at in town on the weekend!).

So what else is happening to make this competition stand out? The station will be posting clues into the whereabouts of Lady GaGa with photo clues on the station website and on Facebook.

Meanwhile over on Twitter – they’ll be recruiting listeners to get involved in the promotion and in the hope of it spreading virally through the network with an online Twitter map. The more people tweet #radiogaga on their tweets – the more the map will zoom in to reveal the local of the GaGa – thus creating a hype and excitement on Twitter and making it a trending topic in the area. Similar to a recent campaign from Volkswagen designed to raise the brands profile around a festival in Brazil.

Metro have also deployed a similar tactic that we used to use at Absolute Radio of an online quiz. However, they’ve missed out on a commercial opportunity  by making each new question into a new web page to help boost site pageviews as users go through the quiz – however, it’s a well designed online quiz with topical audio and GaGa voiceovers to really make it stand out. Go on – give it a go now at http://www.metroradio.co.uk/gaga-quiz/

It’s a neat campaign from the guys at Bauer. It’s exciting to see a strong 360° station promotion that uses all the radio station on air, off air, digital and social touchpoints in a combined fashion to the full. It’s a fun twist on the classic fugitive mechanic and is really helps to communicate the music proposition of the station being based around a key artist – Lady Ga Ga.

Here’s some more tease audio that Metro Radio have created and released via AudioBoo: