Courvoisier Punch messaging campaign

Courvoisier have just run an SMS campaign with O2 to promote their pre-mixed drink, Courvoisier Punch.

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.

The ROI of Social Media.

I really like this animation of an intern at a big corporate discussing the ROI of social media.

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.

Free Beer!

OK, so I’m a bit late in writing this up, so the offer has expired, but it’s still a great example of using mobile to drive engagement from outdoor ads.

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.

Tapping on Redeem brought up a message for the bar staff verifying that the voucher was valid, presumably there was then a button on the till to register the voucher as a sale. Once the voucher had been redeemed once, the Redeem button disappeared from the site and it was impossible to use it again, thus eliminating multiple use fraud. Texting the shortcode again also returned a similar message, meaning it was impossible for people to keep texting for free beer all night.

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.