Commercial Radio Australia has launched a multi-million dollar marketing campaign for its newly minted LG Stylus DAB+ mobile. The device has a digital radio DAB+ chip already installed and allows listeners to tune into all radio stations without eating up their phone data.

The campaign includes five new radio ads with a sultry smooth male voiceover regaling how users can ‘set their music free’ with the smartphone. Listen to the ads here.

It’s a six week campaign spanning radio, out of home, online and paid social media. Ads will further feature on the back of taxis for three weeks across major capital cities. Some 45 on-air presenters and ambassadors will also spruik the phone and its credentials.

The campaign is part of a $US40 million international campaign as other radio bodies look to hook up similar partnerships across the globe.

“Making radio more easily and cost effectively accessible through a broadcast chip in a mobile device is an important plank of our multiplatform strategy,” said Joan Warner, CEO of the CRA.  “We believe younger consumers in particular will be attracted by the ability to access entertainment on the go free of charge.”

At the launch in Sydney two weeks ago, Warner pooed pooed the idea streaming would overtake radio, saying they can work together.

“Using streaming over a mobile network to reach a mass audience of hundreds of thousands of people all listening at the same time, to the same program in good quality, is not practical or technically possible,” she said.

“Especially when you have to take into account there are probably hundreds of thousands of other people using the same network for other things at the same time.”

It would require far too much bandwidth. “As DAB+ is broadcast one to many it is more efficient than one to one streaming.”

That’s not to say radio does not consider radio important, she stressed at the time.