The Campaign

The telco kingdom is ruled by three evils: price, device & network coverage. With all opponents using the same tactics, Virgin Mobile Australia couldn’t out shout bigger competitors. We had to outsmart them. The strongest weapon we had was our in-store experience – but how to drive people instore? Virgin Family rewards were existing incentives, heightened by making them “treasure”. Australians would fight for rewards, telco glory, and fight for Virgin Mobile. Introducing Virgin Mobile Game of Phones, Australia’s largest ever, location-based mobile app challenge where the fight was for over $200,000 of prizes. Via the app, media landscape became battle ground. Warriors claimed loot by tapping their mobile icon within 50metres of prizes, but opponents nearby could steal their loot. We needed constant communication with warriors on the ground, so utilized media that gave real-time updates for game players. Real world media without real time capabilities? We changed it.

Success of the Campaign

In the cutthroat battle of telco’s, Virgin was crowned king! Buzz around Game of Phones secured 338 editorial content pieces reaching over 18 million people, in addition, 103m+ online impressions and 191,095 launch video views. Over three weeks of game play, 14,568 warriors took refuge in a ‘Safe House’ (Virgin Mobile store) to protect their loot, a 10.8% increase period on period. The app achieved 40,000+ downloads, climbing to the top 15 Android apps. In addition, app screen views were 2.5 million and social shares 12,992. We accrued 39,245 warriors playing 64,942 sessions. Prizes were stolen 82,395 times. Total game play equated to over 5 years, delivering $2.5 million in earned media. Players travelled 39,500km carrying prizes – almost six times around Earth Business results speak for themselves: • 47,076 customers activated Velocity rewards (October13 - January14) • 29% uplift in Post paid sales (October13 - January14) • 6:1 ROI

Describe how the campaign/entry was launched and executed across each channel in the order of implementation.

Social and dynamic online messaging naturally formed the campaign foundation, providing live and local tracking of players and rewards. Radio provided live updates & voltage around prizes with street teams engaging retailers. We revolutionised outdoor media by creating real-time targeting, creating a world first! Working with our OOH supplier we created a dashboard that allowed us to control every single panel either individually or together, to push game messages to specific game players, anywhere in real-time (eg. “Warrior Silver, Battleaxe just stole your prize, still in the area!”). We drove traffic to retail stores by making them “safe houses” for warriors to hide with virtual prizes. By adding OOH media to the real-time communications toolkit, we pushed out mass scale, location based live messaging across OOH, Radio, Mobile and Online. This combination of media working together in real time to push out individual, location based messages was a world first.