Why Hit 105’s breakfast topics appear on Goa’s outdoor devices
One year ago, Brisbane outdoor company Goa launched Lowd, a platform allowing commuters to engage with one another through the outdoor screens. Now, Hit 105 has joined up with Goa to cross-promote its breakfast topics. Mumbrella's Zoe Samios chats with Goa's Chris Tyquin and Hit 105 breakfast host Matty Acton to understand why.
One of Brisbane’s outdoor media companies is asking commuters questions on their way to work. Weird, right?
Perhaps what’s more bizarre is that for one whole year, commuters have been responding. That’s right, Brisbane’s commuters – as well as those beyond the city – are answering questions about the same sex marriage poll, Married at First Sight and are even responding to truth or dare.
This week, for instance, the commuters will be looking for a $50 note that’s been left at a bus stop.
But why is this all happening?
It all comes down to an idea Goa joint managing director, Chris Tyquin and his team had just over a year ago. Digital out of home is used in the same way – more or less – in every state across Australia. And while the creativity might not be there yet, for Tyquin, engagement was also a concern.
“One of the things we were observing was that 99.9% of advertisers were just using digital like it was static,” he says. “It was just one piece of copy for a campaign that might have been running for a week, a fortnight or even a month. It just was failing completely from a marketing perspective to take full advantage of the technology.”
So the company set out to launch Lowd, a social platform which can be accessed online by anyone, anywhere. The questions which appear on the platform are formed by locals, for others in the community. The idea is to get passers-by to engage with the outdoor screens.
“We’ve always been used as a non editorial medium, we were just purely ‘the medium is the ad’,” Tyquin explains.
Goa and Hit 105 both discussed this topic, showing the way the two mediums can work together on engagement
“With the technology now, there’s no need to accept that. We thought, other media runs with content, so why couldn’t we?
“If we could run content that was informative for the audience and relevant, topical in a way that would grab their attention, then we could actually turn them into followers.
“We were always free to run news headlines or weather and stuff like that, we didn’t think that was the sort of the content that was engaging enough to take our audience from being passive passers-by to engaged followers.”
Gradually, Lowd built an audience of its own. Commuters were now actively looking for a Goa screen, rather than passively acknowledging it. But amid all this, a few well known bystanders had taken interest: Brisbane’s Hit 105 breakfast team.
Co-hosts Abby Coleman, Stav Davidson and Matty Acton saw a major opportunity: the ability to cross-promote their breakfast content on the outdoor screens.
Hit 105’s Acton says the new partnership is a completely different approach to other, more traditional, radio marketing campaigns.
The partnership allows Acton and his team to amplify on-air exclusives, segments, run competitions and social sharing minute by minute through the Goa screens.
Acton says the partnership is incredibly valuable for the radio network
“Outdoor marketing definitely has its place and definitely is really strong and you get a good reflection of radio results when you have your still billboards but with them, their product is so different in the fact that we have been given space on their digital billboards and have access to that instantly,” he says.
“If we are talking about something on our show, that might be visual, go to our website, check it out. We can also have access to their infrastructure, upload that picture onto the billboard instantly.
“It’s completely different. We don’t buy outdoor marketing saying ‘here’s the three of us’ and it sits there for three months. We can everyday minute by minute change what we put up, depending on what is happening in the show that day.
And the benefit is twofold, with Lowd’s topics becoming part of the everyday discussions, live on air.
“We are in constant communication with them and they have on their Lowd website, their topics and things that they talk about and what we do is we take that and turn it into on air content, phone topics and things and we use some of their responses, some of our responses and then at the end of our phone topics, push it onto their website. Part of the work is trying to simulate content that works for both,” explains Acton.
“The biggest conversation generators are things like Married at First Sight. Those TV channels are advertising on there plus they have their Lowd conversation on that – what a brilliant idea for clients to not just have pictures going up but also a conversation around their marketing at the same time.”
The partnership will last until June, but Hit breakfast is hoping to extend it.
“The value in it for us is phenomenal. What they give us and what we have created together with them has far exceeded anything we ever imagined,” he says.
“We’re pretty excited and we will definitely be wanting to continue it with them.”
Outside of the initiative with Hit 105, Tyquin’s company will seek clients to be involved with Lowd and will even consider native content. But he says quantifying the audience is most definitely the next step.
He says whilst the project is “not anything new”, it is still an exciting time.
“We have tried to keep it as simple as possible. The other thing was no advertisers were going to touch this thing until they could see it working and they could see the audience, get a feel for what’s going on,” he explains.
“It’s early days. We’ll be able to get a lot more data around the size of this audience that come on board and engage, and we can try and turn them into followers.
“At the moment it’s an unmeasured thing other than website traffic. We have commissioned consumer insight research which was indicating about 1 in 3 people in Brisbane would actively look out for what is new on Lowd.
“The immediate challenge is trying to quantify and qualify this audience. At that point we are going to find it a lot easier to monetise.”
