This year’s Voices of 702 with bizhub from Konica Minolta saw genius in its simplicity.

It is the fourth year that the station has run this promotion, which asks listeners to identify the famous voices in a series of short audio clips. All of the voices belong to personalities who would have been interviewed on the station and they range from politicians to sports icons, businessmen and TV stars.

This year the campaign was given a fresh twist, to highlight the sponsor’s ingenius new product, the bizhub quantum model. Among the five voices featured in each montage was one ‘genius’. The genius may not have been a genius in the raditional sense, but someone that was a genius in his or her field – so, for example, Retief Goosen would be a golfing genius and Jonathan Shapiro, a genius of satire.

Players could guess not only who the five personalities were in the montage, but also which of them was the genius – and getting the genius right automatically earned them R1 000, independent of the pot up for grabs if they guessed all five correct.

Listeners get four chances to play on air each day and this year, a parallel competition was run online, at www.702.co.za. This meant that in addition to hearing the on-air montage again, visitors to the site could play the online game, which featured different voices and faces, visitors had to match the voice to the face in order to enter the weekly draw.

The statistics show that Voices of 702 was as popular as ever. Over 20 000 page impressions were recorded over the four-week promotion and 6 700 players tried their luck at the online game.

For Primedia Broadcasting’s promotions manager, Simon Parkinson, the success of this campaign lies in its simplicity. “Voices of 702 proves that radio promotions don’t have to change all the time or be very flashy and complex. In fact, listeners respond best to easy concepts. This promotion has worked before and it worked well again this year.”

“The game creates the talkability that makes any radio promotion work – voices are certainly distinctive, but when you don't add a name to them they're not always instantly recognizable, this is what makes the promotion intriguing ” he said.