WONDERFUL HOLD MUSIC

Short List
TitleWONDERFUL HOLD MUSIC
BrandMYER
Product / ServiceMYER
CategoryA08. Charities, Public Health & Safety, Public Awareness Messages
EntrantCLEMENGER BBDO MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
Idea Creation CLEMENGER BBDO MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
Production FLAGSTAFF STUDIOS Melbourne, AUSTRALIA
Contributing MYER Docklands, AUSTRALIA

Credits

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

The Campaign

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.

Creative Execution

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.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

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.

Links

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