Why Carnival Turned to Horn Honk, Dry VO For “Most Distinctive Audio Campaign” in a Decade

Carnival’s ‘Play Away’ brand platform -- launched six months ago, and designed to last for decades -- has earned the praise of other CMOs and led to sales reps wearing t-shirts emblazoned with campaign characters.

Senior marketing manager Nicole Bradbury told LBB on the latest episode of Heard Mentality, the podcast in partnership with Commercial Radio and Audio, the work is already driving strong commercial results, while noting the cruising category requires playing the “long game.”

“We're on sale until 2028 at the moment. So it's definitely a long-term play,” she said. “I had coffee with a CMO a little while ago and she said, it's the most distinctive audio campaign I've heard in a decade.

“So often, this channel -- audio -- is the afterthought. It's all about the hero TVC and you storyboard that up and you produce that and then you go, 'Better create a script to talk to this.' Whereas it was so well thought-out from the beginning. Angus [Sampson, actor] does the voiceover for the radio and the TVC so you've got fantastic consistency, the structure and the formula is the same, so it definitely wasn't an afterthought.

“I don't think we would ever have an awareness campaign where we didn't have an audio channel.”

The campaign introduced three characters: Jimmy, dancing with the waiter at dinner; Sonya, relaxing in a deck-chair; and the Kaleilei family, ‘stuck’ in paradise. Nicole confirmed new characters are “in the vault” and set to be launched in market, and the existing characters have resonated not just externally, but internally. The brand’s sales team is promoting the characters when they visit travel agents.

“They now have shirts that say 'Onya Sonya' or 'Shimmy Shimmy Jimmy,’” Nicole said. “We've never had a campaign that has threaded that needle so completely all the way down to our on-road sales team. So there's a lot of love for the characters and the campaign itself.”

She added colleagues see the work in the wild and “come up to me and say, 'I saw Jimmy last night'. It's kind of like they're collecting Pokemon.”

The campaign was the first since Carnival acquired competitor P&O, and introduced a range of new distinctive brand assets (DBAs), including a honking cruise horn that ends every ad.

“For anyone who's ever driven past Circular Quay, the horn blast is iconic,” senior strategist Jack Cornwell said.

Nicole took the advice of Mark Ritson seriously, and requested seven DBAs when she briefed Innocean Australia, with an emphasis on sonic assets, so audiences could hear a TV spot “as you're making dinner and go, I know that's a Carnival ad.”

“Audio and radio are such an important channel to include in your media mix because they're the only thing that rely on sound alone,” Nicole said.

“The sip of the cocktail, you can hear the seagulls, the waves crashing ... It really helps paint this rich picture of what it's like to be on a Carnival cruise.”

Nicole took the Innocean team aboard the Carnival Splendour when the agency won the business. Creative director Damon Porter recalled seeing dancing waiters on plinths. “We obviously wrote that into a script.” Jack added, “As you step on board, it is like a feast for the eyes, and we really wanted to bring that into comms and help people to feel that even before they've stepped on board one of our ships.”

The creative team wrote “probably five to 10 lines for every spot that we filmed,” Damon said. “So there's over 100 bespoke assets in market and the placements informed the lines too. They became a huge part of the brief.”

One of Nicole’s favourites is an OOH placement near Sydney’s Circular Quay that reads, “While you're on a little boat, Sonya's on a big ship.” Aurally, the brand is running different executions across radio stations and streamers like Spotify “that speak directly to the difference in that experience,” Nicole noted.

Across the campaign, the dry voiceover from Aussie actor Angus Sampson is critical: it breaks the fourth wall, sets the tone, and invokes the feeling of playfulness.

“We deliberately shot only three shots every commercial, three to five shots,” Damon said. “So there was always an emphasis on the dialogue and the narration. It was always about that. That was the hero.”

Damon added to Nicole, “We had Angus in the first presentation, I don't know if you remember, but he was a slide at the back. It can be a little bit risky putting someone in, because you never know if you're going to get them, right? But we were always writing to his voice, it was so distinct. He's very warm, very friendly, very inviting, and he's great at speaking to the everyman.”

Luckily, the director duo Freudian Nip -- Vic Zerbst and Jenna Owen -- knew Angus, “and that’s how we got him.” The work had to build salience for the cruise line; brand tracking data showed the 53-year-old Carnival brand was starting to lose traction in Australians’ memories.

“The name of the game was salience,” Jack said. “We wanted this to last for the next 10, 20, 30 years.

“How can we build that memory structure for Australians and then continue to build upon that for the next couple of decades?”

Historically, P&O drove category growth, in addition to building its own brand. “And so that torch got passed on to us” when P&O became part of Carnival. Now, “For most people in this market, Carnival will be the first cruise brand that they engage with,” Nicole said.

Building the Carnival brand though, versus merely building the category, required breaking creative category tropes like grand montages. It was a risk to strip it back to a few key moments, then change how those moments show up across the media buy. But it was the right choice to elicit an emotional connection.

“It was a big, bold move for us,” Nicole said, “and it's definitely paid off.”

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Heard Mentality is a podcast series brought to you by CRA and LBB. You can listen to all episodes here.

If you're a brand looking to connect with Australians, there's no better place than Aussie radio and audio. It reaches more than 15 million people every week and truly is where brands are heard. Head to cra.au to get started.

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