Firefox compatible.

Client: Dolby
Creative Agency: Freestyle Interactive
Technology Vendor: DoubleClick's DART Motif

Because this was aimed toward the entertainment audience, we at Freestyle Interactive felt it was critical to create an emotional connection with the viewer, rather than try to focus on the “hi-tech” aspect of Dolby. We wanted to illustrate how sound is not only a critical part of entertainment, but of life itself. Both creative executions invite the viewer to come inside and interact with sound in a highly tactile manner. The Jungle/Ocean unit is designed to illustrate how much a mood can be affected by sound, while the Lightning unit demonstrates the impact of rich, powerful sound in an environment.

The results were phenomenal. Interaction rate with the banners was in the mid-teens. The campaign click-rate was more than 8x the industry average (pegged at 0.20 percent), and traffic to Dolby’s website increased 127 percent over the course of the campaign. Average daily visits to Dolby.com increased 152 percent, showing that the campaign was attracting new users to its site. The coolest statistic of all was that users averaged 3 lightning strikes per interaction.
-- Freestyle Interactive

I love it… The video is eye catching and the interactivity subtle and cool. Most importantly, the sound effect on my computer speakers is impressive even without a subwoofer. The visual, sound and interactivity extends the Dolby brand as innovative and high quality.

The ad makes me want to buy Dolby speakers.  Does Dolby sell speakers?
-- Eric Yang, media director, Black Bag Advertising

Dolby. What is Dolby? The Dolby.com site does a very good job of explaining the various ways in which Dolby sound technologies are in our lives, and the benefits of those technologies. Unfortunately this banner campaign does not.

In the first of the two executions, a distant storm is brewing, and a small silhouette of a man and his dog slowly walk across the screen. I will applaud them for considering the distant sound effect in the execution. It is those small nuances that usually make the difference between good and poor creative, however, the campaign, although clever in execution, succeeds at only the most basic brand communication level; Dolby = Sound. The communication as to why Dolby is better sound fails for one simple reason. Although the visual experience is essentially consistent between most computers, the audio experience is most definitely not. The intended effect, that Dolby sound technologies bring you into the scene are essentially lost on anyone who does not have external speakers connected to their computer, and for them, it could even do the opposite; solidifying a confusion of what, if any, benefit Dolby does provide. For those who do have speakers, they are much more likely to be familiar with Dolby's benefits. So the creative execution ends up missing the majority of the target.

The second execution uses the same screen technique, but allows the user to switch between a rainforest with bird sounds, and a tranquil underwater vista. The creative executions would probably work as a commercial, or a print campaign, where you need an impactful visual metaphor to communicate sound, and you have a large canvas to do it, and I suspect that the agency probably took a print idea and merely "made it interactive," but that is one of the most common mistakes that advertisers and brands make. Metaphors tend not to translate well between media, especially online, where you need to understand the technical communication subtleties of the medium in order to use it effectively.
-- Sean Cummings, VP product development, Dipsie