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.