Want to buy an armpit? How about playing football with a minister?

Astro Radio always pushes the limits to create the most impactful content for its diverse audience segments!

As Malaysia’s favourite radio network, Astro Radio is constantly innovating and creating fresh original content to captivate and grow its diverse, vernacular audience segments. In this issue, MARKETING goes behind-the-scenes to experience the passion and effort behind four popular campaigns that drove social engagement…

BUY MY BODY
Nisha Sundrum
Content Manager MIX

What was the inspiration behind the campaign?
MIX Breakfast Show host, Rod Monteiro, has two aunties battling breast cancer. In conjunction with breast cancer awareness month, we created a campaign that was aimed at lifting up spirits and celebrating life. We sold spaces on the MIX Breakfast Show hosts’ t-shirts. Every time someone donated, their name went up on the t-shirts. At the end of the campaign, our talent wore them and ran at the KL Car Free Morning.

Were there any challenges along the way in executing the campaign?
One of the challenges faced was ensuring transparency. People wanted to be assured that the donations would be going through the right channels, so we chose the National Cancer Society of Malaysia. At the start of the campaign, we aimed to raise RM10,000 in 2 weeks. The thought of coming up with RM10,000 in such a short time felt impossible but with great support, we raised RM12,000.

How did you create awareness and hype for your campaign?
We used MIX’s reach, influence and social media platforms to raise awareness and drive engagement. This helped create a tipping point towards the end of the two weeks, when one of our listeners heard our efforts on the radio and bought the remaining body parts thus helping us surpass our goal.

How was the response towards the campaign?
It was a huge triumph. We helped raise awareness for breast cancer while simultaneously increasing engagement between our fans and talent.

YB Syed Saddiq vs ERA’s Dugong All Stars
Dhan Andreas
Content Manager ERA

What was the inspiration behind the campaign?
It began when we rang up YB Syed Saddiq for an interview, which took five months to organise. We challenged YB via Twitter to play against ERA’s own football team – the Dugong All Stars.YB accepted the challenge and proposed that we play the friendly match in Muar, his hometown, the following week.

Were there any challenges along the way in executing the campaign?
It took five months to book an interview with YB! Our next challenge was having to organise a football match for 5,000 people in just five days. For the football match to be successful, we had to engage celebrities (who all have hectic schedules) to participate, book and get permits for the stadium, etc.

How did you create awareness and hype for your campaign?
First, we got YB on board with a team of celebrities which was sure to be a crowd pleaser.
By hosting the football match in Muar – YB’s hometown – we knew that the locals would be excited to see one of their own in action. We also constructed friendly banter between YB and our JoHaRa Pagi ERA boys on social media.

How was the response towards the campaign?
The stadium was packed to the brim. We also live-streamed the football match on our ERA Facebook page, and that received over 800,000 views.

Unsung Heroes
Subra Veerasamy
Content Manager RAAGA

What was the inspiration behind the campaign?
We wanted to find a way to celebrate and pay tribute to the Malaysian heroes who have made notable differences in the lives of others. During this year-long campaign with our valued partner Digi, fans are encouraged to nominate an unsung hero in their community and we then feature shortlisted stories on RAAGA.

Were there any challenges along the way in executing the campaign?
The challenge we faced was getting the ball rolling. We had to use our talent to coax the unsung hero stories out. Once we had highlighted a few stories, more just kept rolling in. This meant there are actually plenty of unsung heroes out there. We just needed to give people a platform to show their appreciation.

How did you create awareness and hype for your campaign?
What really drove the take up of this campaign was our talent, who are seen as pillars in the community. With their encouragement, our fans slowly gained confidence in sharing their unsung hero stories. We also utilised the strength of our brand’s Facebook and YouTube platforms to amplify our message.

How was the response towards the campaign?
Very humbling. It’s clear that the unsung hero stories have touched our wider audience because the five videos we’ve posted so far have received 461K views and have been shared 873 times.

The LITE Front Page
Rex Musadek
Content Manager LITE

What was the inspiration behind the campaign?
Following the recent GE14, we discovered a growing appetite for current affairs amongst Malaysians.

We created a new weekly segment on our breakfast show called The LITE Front Page.

In this segment, we featured well known Malaysians debating topics of interest moderated by our LITE Breakfast hosts. Some of our guests included Terence Fernandez and Zurairi AR.

Were there any challenges along the way in executing the campaign?
The challenge was finding the right guests who are qualified and interested in participating in this sort of content.

Fortunately, LITE is an established brand in the market and it has been fairly easy convincing our guests to lend us their time and minds.

How did you create awareness and hype for your campaign?
Social media is a huge part of our marketing strategy and we’ve found it to be one of the best platforms to share our original video content.

In fact, earlier this year, we were recognised for our efforts by receiving Bronze in the d-Awards 2018’s ‘Best Use of Social Media’ category.

Therefore, our ongoing awareness strategy is to use both radio and social media hand in hand to drive hype and engagement.

How was the response towards the campaign?
So far response has been really positive. We’ve managed to spark conversations and have received great feedback from our fans on our social media pages and also on WhatsApp.