Virgin Mobile Australia: Game of Phones

Laura Davey, Chris Caley and Jacqui Purcell

Campaign details

Lead agency: Starcom
Contributing agency: Starcom MediaVest Group, Havas WorldWide and One Green Bean
Brand: Virgin Mobile Australia
Country: Australia
Industry Mobile providers
Channels used: Earned media, buzz, Internet - display, Internet - general, Internet - search, Mobile and apps, Online video, Outdoor, out-of-home, Point-of-purchase, in-store, Public relations, Radio, Social media, Sponsorship - media
Media budget: $3 - $5 million

Executive summary

This case study describes how Virgin Mobile Australia created a mobile gaming battleground in which consumers competed for prizes to increase footfall into Virgin stores and seize the advantage from competitors. In the cut-throat Telco kingdom, Virgin Mobile Australia wanted to ambush a category that was fighting a war of attrition on price, device and network coverage. It rewrote the Telco rules of war by making rewards worth fighting for with Game of Phones, Australia's largest ever location-based real and alternate world app challenge, in which consumers were the warriors, mobile was their weapon and $200,000 virtual Virgin rewards their treasure. Game of Phones smashed all targets, creating a 10.8% increase in footfall in-store (more than doubling the 5% target), a huge increase in brand health and engagement results for Virgin Mobile and delivering over 5 years' worth of mobile game play in 6 weeks. This mobile-centric stance set a new precedent for the Australian Telco industry: it was the first time the importance of the mobile device in the lives of consumers was matched by its significance within the media ecosystem, an approach that would deliver transformational change across the Virgin business and push competitors to new extremes in the battle of Telco.

Market background and objectives

The Australian Telco kingdom is ruled by three evils: price, device and network coverage. In a highly competitive battleground where all opponents use the same tactics and conversations, Virgin Mobile Australia was locked into a war of attrition. As a smaller Telco operator with 4% share (versus our nearest rival at 20%) and significantly lower budgets (one third of our nearest competitor's) we couldn't out shout the competition. We had to outsmart them. The strongest weapon in our armoury was our instore experience, as it's the one place we always win. We set the challenge to increase footfall during the summer period (Nov–Dec) by 5%.

With a smaller share of the Telco kingdom and significantly fewer stores than our nearest competitors, driving increased footfall instore was always challenging, especially over the hot Australian summer months. With competitors fighting the battle with significantly bigger budgets, we were constantly behind the market when it came to critical brand health metrics around offering the best devices and best contracts. Our bigger-budget competitors just had more space to say it.

Insight and strategic thinking

Our mobile-mad Millennial audience had one big thing in common: 'life gaming'. Their mobile was their remote-control weapon for a world of games, battles, quests and tournaments, spending 8–11 hours in mobile gaming every week. Their urge to take what they were already doing and make it more fun, interesting and rewarding by turning it into a game touched every aspect of their lives. Gaming was their way of life, but Telco wasn't a game they wanted to play. There's nothing fun about price and device.

A regular promotion wouldn't be enough to drive our highly gamified Millennial audience instore – they were too smart for that. If we wanted to win we would have to play by their gaming rules. At our disposal we had a castle full of Virgin Family rewards (bottles of Virgin wine, Virgin Active gym memberships, Velocity Points and Virgin Atlantic flights), but incentives weren't going to shift footfall. We decided to turn our greatest ammunition, our Virgin Family rewards, into something worth fighting for, by creating a mobile battleground that got Millennials actively fighting their friends, foes and strangers to win part of the Virgin Mobile Empire.

Our idea: ambush the category by making the people of Australia fight for our rewards, fight for Telco glory, fight for Virgin Mobile. Our media strategy was brutally simple: create a mobile battleground where every paid, owned and earned touch point perpetuated gameplay to keep our warriors engaged in battle. We needed to make all of our assets part of a game and part of the fuel that kept players in a constant state of combat. Assets that naturally provided real-time solutions were the perfect fit. Assets without real-time solutions were about to undergo a radical revolution!

Implementation

We ambushed the market by delivering Virgin Mobile Game of Phones, Australia's largest ever location-based mobile app challenge, where consumers battled in the real world and an alternate reality in a bid to win $200,000 worth of virtual prizes. Warriors could claim loot by tapping on the mobile icon when they came within 50 metres of a prize, but winners beware, prizes could then be stolen by other players located within the same vicinity.

A rallying cry to download the app was deployed to the Telco community through social media, online video, radioand OOH; individuals were encouraged to create a unique warrior profile on their mobile to join the battle (see images below). Our Virgin Mobile rewards became the battle currency, dropped virtually across Australia for our warriors to capture and protect.

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To keep the game in play we needed to be in constant communication with our warriors on the ground, so we utilised media that helped us create a real-time self-perpetuating feedback loop with our game players. Social and dynamic online messaging formed the foundation of the campaign, providing live and local tracking of every player and reward. Radio provided us with an opportunity to facilitate live updates and voltage around prizes with street teams to engage retail.

Image: Game of Phones Mobile Interface

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Image: Game of Phones Radio Updates and Street Teams

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We revolutionised outdoor media by creating the world's first outdoor dashboard. Working with our OOH supplier we designed a dashboard (image below) that allowed us to control every outdoor panel individually, or as a group, to push game messages out to players, anywhere and in real time. If you were a player and you popped to a café to grab coffee, we sent you a personalised message to the panel in the café as well as an update on the battle around you at that exact point in time e.g. 'Enjoy your morning coffee, Lord Dalli, you will need it for a tough day of battle' followed by 'Lord Dalli, Battleaxe just stole your prize, he is still in the area!' The dashboard allowed us to add fuel to the battle and keep players gaming throughout the day (images below).

Image: Starcom Game of Phones Dynamic OOH Dashboard Design

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Image: Game of Phones Live OOH Personalised Battle Messages

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The conversation was fuelled further by declaring prizes stolen to those in the battlefield through Facebook and Twitter (images below). We drove footfall instore by turning our Virgin Mobile stores into 'Safe Houses' from the battleground, giving warriors the chance to hold on to their treasure for an hour at a time, learning more about the Virgin Mobile kingdom while fiercely protecting their loot.

Image: Game of Phones Social Media Fuel

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By adding OOH media to the real-time communications kit, we were able to push out mass-scale, location-based, personalised messaging across every channel, gamifying the media landscape to create a unique mobile battleground.

Performance against objectives

In the cutthroat battle of Telcos, Virgin was quickly crowned king. Our revolutionary approach of turning our owned assets – our stores – into 'Safe Houses' drove 14,568 fighters instore, providing an increase in footfall period on period, smashing our target! With Game of Phones as our lead promotion in market and no other advertising running during this period, we were able to deliver an increase in our key brand metrics of 'offers the best contracts' and 'best devices' up 6% and 8% respectively in the month after the campaign. With our paid media fuelling the battlefield, the app secured over 40,000 downloads, climbing to the top 15 apps on Android within the first week. We accrued 39,245 active warriors playing 64,942 sessions. The 531 virtual prizes were stolen 82,395 times; an average of 155 steals per prize. Total game play equated to over 5 years, with players travelling over 239,500 kilometres to acquire their treasure. The constant looting of prizes created a groundswell of social chatter including over 12,000 shares on Facebook and Twitter and 76,000 unique visitors to the Virgin Mobile Australia Facebook page. In the three-week campaign we delivered over $2.5 million in earned media.

The virtual mobile battle received exceptional interest from the Australian public, generating more than 2.5 million screen views across both Android and iOS, and driving more than 103 million online impressions throughout the duration of the game. Social mentions delivered 78% positive sentiment and the press followed suit, heralding Game of Phones as "the game that ruled Australia" (Adnews Dec 17 2013).

Image: Game of Phones Success Infographic

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Innovation and lessons learned

Virgin Mobile Game of Phones had significant impact and implications for not only Virgin's immediate business, but also for the wider media and marketing landscape. Placing the mobile app at the heart of the campaign and ensuring that all media were tasked with perpetuating mobile gameplay was a significant transformation of Virgin Mobile's previous communications approach. Our previous year's promotional campaign, Fair Go Bro, was deliberately social by design, creating a groundswell of social shares and mentions through our twist on the traditional celebrity endorsement. Game of Phones elevated us from a social-by-design approach to a mobile-centric approach by placing mobile at the heart of everything we do and sweating every paid, owned and earned asset. Investment in mobile across both app development and media investment increased threefold during Game of Phones, pushing our total mobile spend for the campaign to 37% (versus our previous campaign investment of 12%).

From an industry point of view, the campaign highlighted the importance of thoroughly understanding your audience and the role certain technology plays in their life. Should the apocalypse strike, it's likely that the last images captured of Earth will be of a crowd, interspersed by the arms of Millennials holding their phones up to capture the cataclysm. Or perhaps another selfie. To young adults, mobile devices are a permanent appendage and a complete lifestyle enabler, their constant source of connection, bridging their real and virtual worlds 24/7. With more smartphones on the planet than people, consumers are fully embracing an era of ubiquitous access, yet more often than not mobile's role within the media mix does not match the significance of the device in consumer's lives.

We believe that mobile is emerging as the channel for all content and Game of Phones typifies this. We turned mobile into the central command device that allowed us to turn all touchpoints across paid, owned and earned channels into real-time, location-based messaging outlets. Mobile fuelled the dynamic content for our outdoor, radio and online creative and provided real-time updates across all social media channels. This mobile-centric stance set a new precedent for the business, one in which the significance of the mobile device in the lives of consumers was matched by the significance of mobile within the media ecosystem.

This mobile-centric stance also provided new ways for our consumers to interact with Virgin Mobile Australia beyond our paid channels, allowing us to turn non-digital owned assets, like our stores, into interactive spaces that fuelled virtual gameplay and provided a different conversation with our audience. Applying this unique approach to the way we think about stores or retail space across the globe has the potential to deliver transformational change.