The Brief

The highly competitive telco kingdom is ruled by price, device & network coverage. Virgin Mobile Australia couldn’t out shout the bigger competitors. We had to outsmart them. The strongest weapon we had was our in-store experience. But getting people instore was a battle in itself. Virgin Family rewards were existing instore incentives. These were turned into” treasure” and the people of Australia incentivised to fight for them. The prize pool was worth over $200,000. Introducing Virgin Mobile Game of Phones, Australia’s largest ever mobile app challenge. But how to drive real world traffic in store via an app game – typically played virtually? The app needed to become real world. For players to fight in both the real world and in alternate reality we had to change the capabilities of outdoor media in Australia. Warriors could claim loot by tapping on the mobile icon within 50 metres of prizes in the real world, but prizes could be stolen by other players nearby. We transformed outdoor panels, traditionally static or with pre-set digital formats, to be real time, location based screens. These allowed constant communication with warriors on the ground, customising messages based on their real world location. A world first.

The Game of Phones hub was innovative alternate reality mobile app game, with a control centre created and tracked by creative agency One Green Bean. Social media and dynamic online messaging naturally formed the foundation of the campaign in real time, providing live and local tracking of every player and reward. We revolutionised outdoor media by creating real-time targeting & messaging, creating a world first! Working with our outdoor supplier, oOh! Media, we created a dashboard (Dynamic OOH Content Management System – or CMS) that merged location based geo targeting with digital panels displaying site-specific messages. A win for the Agency and Virgin Mobile, our concept was entirely funded by oOh! who built exactly what we required, at their expense, predicting the future monetisation of the innovation for their business. CMS allowed us to control every single panel individually, or as a group, so that we could push game messages out to specific game players, anywhere and in real-time (eg. “Warrior Silver, Battleaxe just stole your prize, he is still in the area!”) – taking the Game of Phones from virtual to real world. We drove traffic to our retail stores by making them “safe houses” for warriors to hide with virtual prizes. By adding CMS to the real-time communications toolkit, we were able to push out mass scale, location based live messaging across Outdoor, Radio and Digital media. This combination of media working together in real time to push out individual location based specific messages was a world first. As a result, oOh! Media are actively selling the capability to control imdividual or grouped panels, in real time, in the hands of the clients... no material despatch, no media stakeholder approval, in market literally within minutes. We effectively created a new product and (potential) revenue stream for the Outdoor industry.

In the cutthroat battle of telco’s, Virgin was crowned king! Over the game’s play Business Results spoke for themselves: • 47,076 customers activated Velocity rewards (October13 - January14) • 29% uplift in Post paid sales (October13 - January14) • 338 editorial pieces with a reach of 18m+ • 6:1 ROI • 39,245 active users played 64,942 sessions • 2.5m app screen views • 12,992 app social shares • 14,568 players entered a Virgin Mobile store to protect their prize/s • 531 prizes stolen 82,395 times; 155 steals per prize • 103m+ online impressions • Players travelled 239,500km carrying prizes. Almost six times around the Earth Not only did we surpass all business objectives, but we have set a market first precedent which has opened the doors to the floodgate of dynamic OOH, and cross channel messaging. We have provided all advertisers in this market a unique and new opportunity to manage messaging in ways they'd never been able to before. Out of home has become a real time, location specific medium with ability to customise individual messages for greater relevance and meaning than ever before.