Game of Phones is a mobile gaming app that challenges users to hunt prizes in the virtual world. The app allows live interaction between thousands of people on the streets of Australia. The King - meaning the ultimate winner - will be rewarded with a 50K USD luxury escape.
Virgin Mobile Australia is a small telecom operator with only 4% share vs. the nearest competitor at 20 percent and significantly lower budgets (one-third of the nearest competitor). So it had to come with a stunning idea in order to outshout the competition. Campaign target: increase Australia’s footfall during the summer period by 5 percent.
Target Audience: Millennials keen on playing games on their devices that spent more than 11 hours every week playing.
Creative Strategy: No ordinary reward strategy would have had such an impact. These incentives like bottles of Virgin wine, Virgin Active gym memberships, Velocity Points, and Virgin Atlantic flights weren’t going to increase footfall rate.
So, the way of obtaining the prizes should be taken to a whole other level: envisioning a mobile battlefield that transforms anyone into your closest competitor for winning part of the Virgin Mobile Empire.
The media strategy: create a mobile battlefield where every paid, owned, and earned touchpoint kept the warriors engaged in the game. It was the fuel that perpetuated the gameplay
The mobile app was the core of the campaign. Virgin Mobile ensured that all media were helping at keeping the game alive.
The app enhanced the brand’s popularity by putting the mobile experience to the core and it was Australia’s largest location-based mobile app challenge.
Users fought like warriors in both the real world and a virtual reality in a race to win virtual prizes worth more than 200,000 USD.
So, the streets, the parks, the malls were turned into battlegrounds which users declared conquered by tapping on the mobile icon when they came within 50 meters of a prize.
The trick is that the prizes could be stolen by other players in the close area.
A big fuss to install the app was created through social media, online video, and radio, and users were encouraged to create a unique warrior profile on their mobile device to join the battle. The stake of being in the game was capturing the rewards and protect them.
Online messaging was the foundation of the campaign, generating permanent updates regarding every player and reward. It was an extended control over the outdoor panels, messages in retail locations as hints and updates on the battle around the area.
During the three weeks of the battle, more than 14k users took refuge in the Virgin Mobile safe houses, representing a 10.8 percent increase period on period, smashing the target. The mobile app gathered more than 40,000 downloads, climbing to the top 15 apps on Android within the first week.
Total results of the battlefield: 39,245 active warriors playing 64,942 sessions. The 531 prizes were stolen 82,395 times, an average of 155 steals per prize. 12,992 social shares on Facebook and Twitter and 76,000 unique visitors to the game’s Facebook page. The total campaign delivered 2.5 million in earned media.
