Cat Empire's Ollie McGill Wins Awards For Viral Hit Jingle

The viral hit Dumb Ways To Die was officially recognised in its radio form this week when it was awarded the Golden Siren at this year's annual Commercial Radio Australia awards for radio advertising.

The song that fronted a safety campaign for Melbourne's Metro Trains, Set Fire To Your Hair was penned by Cat Empire keyboardist Ollie MGill and sung by Tinpan Orange's Emily Lubitz. The radio campaign that featured the jingle also won two Silver Sirens (Single Category and Campaign Category) as well as the Client Award.

The awards were presented on Friday to the campaign's creative team at McCann (the agency that also brought us the giant pool table TVC for Mother) and Metro. John Mescall, a McCann representative, said of the win: "We knew that people didn't want to hear our message at all. It's rail safety.

"So our idea was to embed our rail safety message into a song: a piece of content so desirable, that our audience would not only willingly listen to it, but if we put it on iTunes, maybe actually pay money to own it. I guess the inspiration was to make a radio ad that was nothing like a radio ad, but a lot more like the content on either side of the ads: the music.

"We tried to make a radio ad that was nothing like a traditional radio ad. It's a song first and foremost with a subtle but unmistakable message embedded into it. The fact that a lot of radio stations around the world have chosen to play the three-minute version of our ad for free, as part of their music programming, tells us that we may well have pulled it off."

The clip for Dumb Ways To Die has now had over 45 million hits on YouTube.