As part of this years Bud Rising Activity Budweiser last night held a special free gig at the Temple Bar Music Centre in Dublin where Maximo Park were performers together with The Noisettes. Tickets were advertised last week in the city's free sheet newspapers after a significant period of online advertising.
Banner ads directed anyone who clicked through to the official budrising website to an area where they could register to receive a free ticket, the ticket for the event was then sent to their mobile phone. If you remember we did this before at a Primal Scream event last November in the Guinness Storehouse? Upon arrival promotional staff validated all tickets through a networked system to prevent mal - redemption.
Anyway, last night we officially introduced the newest member of our family - our Bluetooth machine! Posters around the venue called on revellers to turn on their bluetooth to receive a video clip of the band's new video to their phones for free. About 600 people were there on the night and so it was a great opportunity to see bluetooth in action. The interest that was generated from the posters and the file arriving onto phones was great to see and also quite obvious as we witnessed sights of fans looking into their phones to download the content and showing the clip to friends. A great introduction for bluetooth and hopefully just the beginning...
Posted by lisa | Comments (1)
Pepsi have just introduced bluetooth as part of their US Marketing efforts. The brand is using bluetooth in 120 transit shelters across Los Angeles, Washington, New York, Pittsburgh and Denver.
The bluetooth bus shelters recognise enabled phones with it's vacinity, send out offers of a free music video and if the receiver accepts they are directed to check out Pepsi's branded music site - Smash. Also, with added coolness these bluetooth posters as they light up each time a user accepts a download! In each city the video opens up with a local hero who introduces the acts in the video.
There have been acquisations that this sort of promotion is verging into spamming territory but largely those voices have been silenced through the fact that the downloads are valuable to the receiver/consumer and so they're more acceptable. Bluespamming is when bluetooth is used to send marketing messages in an untargeted manner to any/all phones that happen to be in the area at the time. Using Bluetooth in this way has been largely criticised in the UK and more so in the US where it is used more frequently.
This is not to say that using bluetooth in a marketing context is wrong but just that randomly spamming people is (In any case really). Bluetooth like all mobile marketing works alot better when it is an "opt - in" communication rather than one - way. When the consumer decides to initiate the dialogue the whole interaction becomes more powerful and ultimately longer term. Still though, Fair play to Pepsi.
UPDATE: According to Picturephoning.com, In the first week of the Pepsi campaign, opt-in rates to download content were reported to be 27% across the network of 120 bus shelters.
Posted by lisa | Comments (0)