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Entertaining the dependents

In a bid to assist mothers who have heard the Frozen soundtrack once too many times but don’t really want navigate the online catalogues of children’s music, Pandora has teamed up with Huggies to develop a radio station dedicated to musical tastes of the youngest of young’uns.

To access the tailored Huggies playlist, mothers simply have to search for the mixtape station ‘Huggies Nappy Pants Radio’ and then let Pandora take over. The station has been customised with Huggies branding, and provides a discrete space for Huggies to occupy within the platform. 

Rachel Culleton, associate director at Mindshare Australia says this year’s Huggies Nappy Pants commercial programme idea being ‘The Joy of Moving’, it wanted to help facilitate mum to get bub moving via the power of music. 

“And the Pandora partnership offered us the perfect platform via ‘Huggies Groove Central Station’ to do just that. Both us and Kimberley Clark have been extremely happy with how the campaign has gone.” 

This follows on from previous campaigns that Pandora has run with the likes of Coca-Cola, Holden and the Electoral Commission among others, and the streaming service’s commercial director in New Zealand Melanie Reece says that advertisers are happy with the results they acheive on the platform. 

“We have been completely overwhelmed by the positive reaction from the market – with NZ’s leading brands trialling Pandora last year.  80 percent of those advertisers return to us once they see our results and understand how targeted and measurable a radio campaign can be, they love to be able to measure return on investment.  One of they key drivers of our success  has been the ability to deliver real time data insights at the end of a campaign.”

She also says that campaigns don’t have to be sophisticated to succeed. 

“I actually think the most effective campaigns are the simple ones that leverage our own Pandora insights that come directly from our audience,” she says. “It’s very simple to execute on Pandora because we design all the assets as part of our offering including voicing the ads at no charge.  We do this so that advertisers can make the most of the platform – our listeners in NZ have told us that they want advertisers to “show me you know me” and talk directly to them in a personalised way, just the same as Pandora personalises their music listening.  It’s actually very simple.”

But Pandora isn’t the only online streaming service providing music for kids. Last year, iHeartRadio also announced a channel called Kiwi Kids. 

 

At the time of the launch of the station, iHeartRadio head Carolyn Luey said that the station would be monetised through a sponsorship model. 

“The bespoke stations we are creating on iHeartRadio like Kiwi Kids are sponsorship properties where we target clients who are a good brand fit for the station,” said Luey. “For example the NZ Top 40 station is currently sponsored by Paper Plus as it was a good fit with their ‘Favourites’ campaign.”

She said that this model is viable on iHeartRadio, because the costs introducing an online station “are significantly less than launching a terrestrial station” and this has given TRN the flexibility “to develop and test new station propositions very cost effectively”. 

And radio innovations aren’t limited to human dependents. The well-awarded K9FM campaign, developed by Colenso BBDO in partnership with Pedigree, famously provided a radio station dedicated entirely to dogs who were left at home.

In a similar vein, Nohl Rosen, a relatively unknown guy from Arizona, runs a website and radio station for cats, called Cat Galaxy Radio. And according to an article published on Vice last year, he estimates that 5 million listeners have tuned into his station since it first launched in 2001 (the website seems not to have been updated in all that time). 

The motivation behind this novel experiment is perhaps best explained in the words of Rosen: “It all started with my cat, Isis. She was the driving force for the radio station. I mean, she was the whole inspiration for it. I remember one day she was meowing pretty insistently and she didn’t want food, she didn’t want water, and she didn’t want to play. I just kinda clued in and said, OK, I think I know what you’re asking me for! There was a CD that was sitting on the table—I think it was a funk mix CD … “


(Rosen with his cat – image credit: catster.com

Now all we need is a radio station for hungover ad employees that delivers shots of Gatorade into the body through sound waves.   

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