Title | WONDERFUL HOLD MUSIC |
Brand | MYER |
Product / Service | MYER |
Category | A08. Charities, Public Health & Safety, Public Awareness Messages |
Entrant | CLEMENGER BBDO MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA |
Idea Creation | CLEMENGER BBDO MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA |
Production | FLAGSTAFF STUDIOS Melbourne, AUSTRALIA |
Contributing | MYER Docklands, AUSTRALIA |
Name | Company | Position |
---|---|---|
James McGrath | Clemenger BBDO Melbourne | Creative Chairman |
Ant Keogh | Clemenger BBDO Melbourne | Chief Creative Officer |
Evan Roberts | Clemenger BBDO Melbourne | Creative Director |
Stephen de Wolf | Clemenger BBDO Melbourne | Creative Director |
Simon Lamplough | Clemenger BBDO Melbourne | Group Managing Partner |
Grant Oorloff | Clemenger BBDO Melbourne | Account Director |
Ben Keenan | Clemenger BBDO Melbourne | Interactive Creative Director |
Chris Jovanov | Clemenger BBDO Melbourne | Interactive Creative Director |
Tom McQueen | Clemenger BBDO Melbourne | Creative |
George McQueen | Clemenger BBDO Melbourne | Creative |
Carolyn Mackintosh | Clemenger BBDO Melbourne | Creative Director |
Matthew Kingston | Clemenger BBDO Melbourne | Senior Planner |
Amalia Makris | Clemenger BBDO Melbourne | Agency Producer |
Phil Kenihan | Front of House Sound | Sound Designer / Engineer |
We turned the frustrating act of being on hold into a means of raising money for charity. Throughout the Christmas period, regular hold music was replaced with music that generated royalties each second customers spent on hold, which were then donated directly to The Salvation Army. Instead of just being told ‘your call is important’, we actually made it important as customers generated a donation by simply waiting on the line.
We created ‘Wonderful Hold Music’, which turned the frustrating act of being put on hold into a means of raising money for charity. We replaced the canned hold music with the Myer Spirit of Christmas album. Every second spent listening generated a royalty that Myer donated directly to The Salvation Army’s family and domestic violence work. Customers on hold were informed that their call was important not only to Myer, but to the families affected by domestic violence that they were raising money for just by waiting on the line.
Every minute spent on hold generated a five-cent donation (25 times more than Spotify’s royalty rate). Over the Christmas shopping period (December 1 25) $32,691 was raised by patient shoppers, turning the dull act of being on hold into a wait worth something. As a result, by turning frustration into philanthropy, Myer’s call abandon rate dropped from 40% to 5% over Christmas 2015, creating positive outcomes and a merry Christmas for the customer, the charity and Myer.
We combined one of the oldest, most frustrating forms of ad media (hold music) with one of the newest technologies (earning royalties via streaming music) to create the first innovation retail hold music has seen in generations.
Being put on hold while being directed to the shop floor is an inescapable and frustrating process for most retailers, not to mention customers. Myer had a drop-off rate of 40%, which we had to improve. It would have been prohibitively expensive to condense the time people waited, so instead we used creativity and altruism to reframe the value of that time.