Creatively, we sought to encourage swimmers and build brand advocacy by talking to them at a unique time. From a media perspective, it became clear that the best time was, in fact, while the swimmers where in the water and approaching the end of what was a very grueling journey. This gave us the media idea of creating the world’s first ‘underwater radio station’ on which we sold broadcasting space to five major advertisers.

The Go Buoy was successfully launched at the Rottnest Channel Swim on the 22nd of February 2014. We reached 100% of our target audience and thousands of swimmers heard motivational music and messages from our five advertisers over an approximate distance of 1.5km (1km as they approached Go Buoy and 500m beyond it to the finish line.) Go Buoy also generated substantial earned media on radio, Twitter, Facebook and in print and sparked lots of great word-of-mouth from the swimmers themselves (see case study).