Thanks to Simon Andrews and the gang at www.addictivemobile.com for pointing it out in their fantastic Mobile Fix newsleteer.

O2 enable advertisers to precisely select their target audience, which is essential for drinks brands that need to ensure they only reach an 18+ audience. As well as age targeting, brands can choose to target by location and customer preferences, such as Comedy, Going Out, etc.

These ads offer O2 customers a free sample of Courvoisier Punch at the Pleasance Theatre Courtyard at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where Courvoisier were running a sponsored bar. This is a great way of extending the sponsorship, whilst offering customers something of value.

I think that the same point could be made about mobile. Companies that don’t embrace mobile in the next 12 months are going to be alienating more and more of their customers. There are already 2.5 million people in the UK that say their primary means of accessing the internet is their mobile phone. This is set to rise to more than 5 million by the end of 2012. OK, so it’s not as many people as watch X Factor on a Saturday night but it’s still a significant constituency. Plus, by the end 2012, there will be well over 30 million people that access the internet from mobile devices at least once a month. If the one time these people access the mobile internet is to engage with your brand, you’re going to piss them off pretty quickly if you’re still using Flash and they get a blank screen.

Thanks to www.digitalbuzzblog.com for pointing out the video, and www.mobilesquared.co.uk for the stats.

Blue Moon is a Belgian style Witbier from Molson Coors that was brought to the UK in 2010. Summer of 2011 saw a big push from Coors to drive awareness, trial and sales, which led to this outdoor campaign offering FREE BEER. Outdoor 6 sheets were used to publicise the offer and all customers had to do was text Bluemoon1 to 66644 to receive their voucher for a free 1/2 pint. The text mechanic is location based with the number at the end of Bluemoon refering to the location of the poster. All posters had a unique location number so that engagement hot spots could be tracked and customers could be directed to their nearest pub serving Blue Moon.

The reply message from the shortcode included a link to get your free voucher. Clicking on the link took the customer to a mobile site (designed and produced by Mobious www.mobius.net) with details of the nearest Blue Moon pub and a button to redeem the voucher.

By delaying posting this until now, I have been able to glean some results from the campaign as well. In the words of Mobious themselves, “Redemption rate was in excess of 25%, against an industry norm of 2% to 4%. Social Media sharing levels were high and cost per redemption was low.”

I think this is a great example of mobile being used as a form of engagement in a wider ad campaign. There should be a lot more of this immediate gratification from ads and using mobile to enhance the impact of other media. I’m guessing that this campaign would’ve got a lot of people to try Blue Moon who would’ve seen the posters but not normally taken any action. The in-bar voucher redemption was simple and didn’t require any changes to EPOS systems or lots of staff training. Congratulations to all involved.

There’s the recent award winning implementation from Tesco who set up a virtual store on the Korean subway. Perhaps my favourite of this bunch is from Radisson Edwardian (www.radissonedwardian.com) who have added QR codes to their menus.

QR codes on menus

Scanning the code enables diners to view a video of the chef preparing the dish. This adds an element of theatre to the experience, as well as giving the diner a better idea of what it is that they are ordering. Imagine being able to scan the menu in one of Heston Blumenthal’s restaurants! Econsultancy also have an interview with Amy Clarke, the E-Commerce manager at Radisson Edwardian http://bit.ly/n3bpy8.

The notable thing about all 8 of the QR codes highlighted in this article is that they all link to a properly mobile optimised experience. The most common failure for QR codes, that I have scanned, has been that they link to a standard website, which is difficult to navigate on a mobile phone. The worst link to Flash sites, have broken links or deliver absolutely nothing of value, or interest, to the customer.

What are the best, and worst QR campaigns that you’ve seen?

Presumably, Fidelity international are assuming that their target audience all have smartphones with QR code readers, as they haven’t included any instructions on what a QR code is or how to scan one. It’s admirable that the traditionally reserved financial services industry is starting to use QR codes but I can’t help thinking that they would have a better response if they had included some explanation and an SMS call to action alongside the QR code. Linking through to a mobile optimised site would also improve their conversions on the back end. As it stands, I doubt many people will scan the code (at least outside of the mobile obsessed like yours truly!) and those that do make the effort will almost certainly drop out as soon as they hit the standard website.

The Fidelity ad

The QR code and call to action

The end result

10 out of 10 for effort, but only a 5 for implementation.

I don’t know how much they’re going to be charging Starbucks for this service, but O2 charge 25p per message sent to their O2 More database. If they charge anything like this for this geo-targeted service then I can’t see how the numbers would stack up for Starbucks. Let’s say a coffee costs £2.50 and they’re running a half price promotion, so they’re selling it for £1.25. Let’s say that there are 10,000 O2 customers that walk past a Starbucks and receive the promotional SMS, that’s a cost of £2,500. Now, if we’re really generous and say there’s a 20% take-up of the offer, that’s 2,000 people that are going to buy a coffee at £1.25. Or £2,500 in revenue, which is just enough to cover the cost of the messages. Which means that Starbucks are effectively giving away 2,000 coffees for free. And I think that that 20% take-up is being really generous, a more realistic rate might be 10%, or 1,000 people buying a coffee at £1.25. Now you’ve got a £2,500 cost of the promotion being rewarded with £1,250 of revenue. Neither of these scenarios are going to lead to Starbucks placing a repeat booking with O2.

Obviously I’m a great fan of mobile marketing and advertising, but I just can’t see how this stacks up in terms of customer experience or advertiser finacials. I’m happy to be persuaded otherwise if any of you can put a convincing argument forward.

Here are some screenshots of the end to end experience in the AccuWeather app.

It’s a pretty smooth and painless user experience, but I’m not convinced it’s the best solution for advertisers. If I was Yell!, I would want people who had just downloaded my app to leave the AccuWeather app so that they could start using mine. In this world of tiny attention spans I’m likely to have forgotten that I downloaded a new app by the time that I come out of whatever I was doing. OK, so that’s perhaps not true for the AccuWeather app, but it could be for a deeper news app, for example.

It’s entirely possible that people will forget they’ve downloaded the Yell! app and not actually open it until days later. iPhone app pages are getting pretty cluttered with all the apps and folders that people are acumulating and it’s important to get your app into the customer’s mind as quickly as possible.

What are your thoughts?

Good use of SMS as a direct response mechanic from the Economist. Texting the shortcode gets you a reply message, below, and the Economist’s subscription team will call you back. I saw a similar mechanic run by The Times a few months ago. The only downside to this implementation is that there’s no signal on the underground, where I saw this ad, so you miss out on the immediacy that mobile offers. I’d be really interested to know how many responses The Economist had to this campaign.