Situation:

Singapore is a digital-ready nation. It presents a combination of a young, upwardly mobile population, a high smartphone ownership rate (82% penetration), and ultra-fast internet.

Singaporeans use their smartphones at all times and at all places. And just like in the rest of the world, this includes bathrooms. According to WIRED, over 90% of people use cell phones in the loo.

This new behaviour has replaced the bathroom reading opportunities, limiting even further the reading time for young people. According to Singapore’s National Library Board, only 25% of people pick up a book more than once a week.

Brief:

Storytel Singapore needed an innovative solution to boost audiobook downloads.

Objectives:

- Increasing the audiobook downloads for the first semester of 2020.

- Capturing the personal information of thousands of new potential users engagingly.

- Developing a low-tech and cost-effective solution to push downloads.

Our research showed that toilet breaks were one of the best moments to encourage people to enjoy literature in their daily routines.

Obviously, we couldn’t exploit or promote reading by going inside people’s bathrooms. Instead, we brought people into ours.

Storytel created the first-ever public restrooms that turn toilet-goers into literature users by offering an immersive literature-based experience. Each specially designed stall played curated audiobooks to the people inside to take advantage of this “literally captive audience”.

This is a pre-Covid-19 world strategy.

Storytel’s audience comprises young people who are heavy mobile users. That is why we targeted concerts and event attendees as a potential fit for our audiobook app. These venues offer a huge opportunity to collect personal data while boosting app and content downloads.

Every year, Garden Beats gathers over 8,000 people from Singapore and South-East Asia. We partnered with them by buying media presence in a wholly unexpected and unexplored location: their public restrooms.

While other places or media opportunities during the concerts were totally overcrowded with brands, we had a privileged location where no one else had tried to communicate with people ever before.

These specially designed restrooms were equipped with very distinctive features:

- Motion-activated speakers: so that each stall could play a different audiobook to the person using the booth.

- Book-inspired exterior and interior design so that people could feel wholly immersed in each story.

- An invitation to take with them the story on each stall along with thousands of audiobooks more. The booth invited users to claim a 30-day free trial by simply scanning a code with the phones that they always carry with them.

Our ready-to-use toilets were developed to be taken to any event, park, or venue. They were launched for over 8,000 people at Garden Beats 2020, Singapore’s biggest art and picnic festival.

To create awareness and increase the attendees’ interest in our toilets, the stalls were promoted along with the Garden Beats 2020 communication plan.

- Our activation was placed at the toilet area, a strategic and impossible to avoid location. This is why our special toilets were seen by up to 8,000 concert-goers during the event day.

- Over 4,000 people used our toilets and engage with our activation.

- Audiobook downloads reached 15% more users than previous years during the same period.

- This idea propelled a low-tech, cost-effective solution to push audiobook downloads wherever needed.

- We encouraged young Singaporeans to opt for audiobooks as the preferred activity during toilet breaks.