There’s no shortage of sponsorship agreements and partnerships in the audio world, but a truly successful integration of the sort exemplified by Gravy Chip is much harder to come by.

At the recent Mumbrella Audioland conference in Sydney, Wade Kingsley, founder and CEO of The Ideas Business, held up Australian radio duo Hamish and Andy’s Gravy Chip as the gold standard in audio integration. (For more, read WARC’s report: The recipe for successful brand-led sound integrations.)

A decade ago, when the pair of radio hosts were idly wondering on air about whether potato chip manufacturers come up with chip flavours or the marketing teams decide what will appeal to consumers before creating the taste, they sparked an unexpected chain of events.

Callers started to ring into the show to share their thoughts on the subject, including one who put them in touch with a food scientist who had worked for Smith’s chips. When the hosts pitched to the scientist to make them a flavour, the idea was born and Smith’s was brought into the conversation.

The integration then took on a life of its own as the hosts crowdsourced potential flavours before gravy was settled on. Several weeks later, the culmination of the integration was an event called ‘Chipapalooza’ hosted on a boat which had been named the Gravy Boat.

“I understand the marketing guy at Smith’s got some massive promotion globally,” observed Kingsley, who highlighted that “the moral of the story is, it’s about the story” – not some manufactured brief brought to the station by a client or agency.

For brands looking to replicate this, Kingsley has some advice. “If you’re in marketing and you are listening to a radio, think about placing your brand in the conversation that’s happening and make that approach. It’s really important to have the play coming from both ways,” he concluded.

Sourced from WARC