The radio that dials the phone for your hotel.

Radio campaign that dials, that is. I’m into any experiential work that plays with the surrounding environment, and when I saw this idea from agency They, I thought it was simple but cool. How it works: The radio spot ‘dials’ a phone by broadcasting DTMF tones, which communicate a phone number to a touchtone phone. In this case, the number goes to Hotel Arena in Amsterdam. (Create your own, kids!)

More I thought about it though, the idea seems greater than the sum of the parts... or something like that. Meaning, the tech and the idea has many uses in advertising—I just don’t think using radio in this way is necessarily one of them. The hole in the execution basically requires you to be in front of the radio at precisely the time the spot runs, and more importantly, you’d need to be in the market for a room reservation right then and there.

Again, I like the idea of using tones to do stuff, it just seems at times like we create another way to accomplish a task that didn’t need to be created. If people need a room, there’s online reservations, or they can simply use their cell. This execution doesn’t make that experience any easier or cooler beyond, “Hey, the radio made my hotel ring—awesome!”