City Lodge turned its wake-up-call cliché into bedtime stories for business travelers

For South African business travelers, sleep is scarce: economic worry, deadlines and anxiety keep them awake. City Lodge Hotels, with agency TBWA Hunt Lascaris, saw an opportunity in the hotel's most stereotyped ritual — the morning wake-up call — and inverted it into 'Bedtime Stories for Business People'.

Guests checking in now find a bookmark with a QR code; scanning it opens a playlist of nine witty audio stories designed to lull even the most anxious entrepreneurial traveler to sleep. The team treated the project like a writer's room, bringing many voices together to make the tales rich and playful rather than clinical.

The mechanic is deliberately simple: it lives inside the room, costs almost nothing to distribute, and turns a functional stay into something memorable and shareable. It also gave the brand a distinctive story in a market where hotel marketing usually competes on rates.

Juries noticed the craft: 'Bedtime Stories for Business People' won a Graphite Pencil at the D&AD Awards 2024, one of three campaigns that made TBWA Hunt Lascaris South Africa's most-awarded agency at the show that year.