Brief:
- Quick-service seafood chain Long John Silver's boosted its Twitter engagement with a campaign that features songs that serve as in-store audio coupons. Customers who visit a restaurant and play a song from an original Long John Silver's playlist on streaming music app Soundcloud are eligible for food an drink discounts, according to a press release shared with Mobile Marketer.
- Each song in the playlist was recorded by the Coral Benders, a band based in Washington, D.C., that plays "beach-adjacent" dad rock. Long John Silver's is releasing a new song from the playlist every Friday from March 6 to April 19. The first piece, "The Ballad of Long John Silver," saw engagement that was two- to three-times greater than benchmarks.
- Long John Silver's campaign is timed for its busiest season: the approximately six-week period of Lent, when many Christians abstain from eating meat in the lead-up to Easter. Agency Baldwin& developed the campaign, which launched on Ash Wednesday — March 6 — with posts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Insight:
Long John Silver's audio-themed campaign aims to create a more immersive experience that urges customers to get into the right mindset for seafood. "The No. 1 reason motivating our audience both to crave fish or not to crave it, was their mood," Stephanie Mattingly, VP of marketing for Long John Silver's, said in the company announcement. Because its customers reportedly tend to be music fans, the company formed a record label called Fish Yeah! Records to record humorous songs — with titles like "Pisces Season," "Seafood Mood" and "WTF (Want the Fish)" — that help to evoke memories of visiting the beach.
The campaign also boasts a strong mobile component by requiring customers to use their smartphone to play songs from the playlist to receive audio-based discounts each week. Still nascent, audio coupons are taking different forms with the growing popularity of voice-recognition devices. Last year, Target teamed up with Google on a voice-activated coupon on Google Assistant. Shoppers could activate the discount with a voice command to a smart speaker or smartphone running the search giant's virtual assistant.
The restaurant chain isn't the only brand to highlight original music as a way to engage customers recently. Procter & Gamble's Febreze air freshener brand this month released an eight-track album of musical ads that had gained a following on social media. The album is a compilation of the most popular Febreze ads in the style of hip-hop, country, pop and more. Similarly, P&G's Olay skincare brand on April 9 will stage an off-Broadway musical comedy about a woman who seeks to regain her "glow."
