Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase





2019 | |

The Sound of Aloha

Advertiser: AirAsia X
Brand: AirAsia X
Creative Agency: -
Credits: -

The Challenges
AirAsia recently launched their first direct flight to USA as an experiment to gauge travelers’ demand for the US with their first flight to Hawaii. Although Hawaii is desirable, many Malaysians don’t feel it’s worth it with the harrowing 17 hours flight. We needed to encourage people to experience Hawaii with only 15% of our average campaign budgets.

Insight, Strategy and the Idea
As our young travelers are usually active and on the move, we found that there’s one period when they’ll be stuck with nowhere to go: Traffic jams. Traffic jams are a painful staple of their everyday. With only the radio as their companion, they’re stuck on the road with cars honking all around, wishing for an escape from it all. Hawaii is a natural solution for them, with Malaysians’ desiring its relaxing lush beaches. This image is so strong that our research participants’ eyes usually glaze over, daydreaming on the possibility of escaping to Hawaii’s pristine paradise. We wanted to continuously trigger this powerful image among our travelers during traffic jams, a time when they feel most in need of a holiday. Our Idea: The ASMR Experience Sounds of Hawaii.

Media Execution
We transformed our radio media airtime into a ‘Hawaii ASMR experience’ by seeding in all the sounds of Hawaii: the beaches’ waves, sands, dolphins, poke bowls and more! The station’s own trusted radio DJ narrated listeners through the Hawaiian journey. Instead of buying normal 30 second ads, we bought longer 60 seconds slots to deliver longer relaxing sounds of Hawaii. Rather than being frustrated in traffic, our listeners experienced a relaxing full minute through our ASMR Hawaii.

Results and Effectiveness
Despite having 85% lesser budget, our ASMR clips were listened by 836,000 people in total! We also achieved +45% more media value than what we invested. Surprisingly increased demand for Hawaii that AirAsia decided to extend their USA flights to include Los Angeles.