Orange Wednesdays: two-for-one movie tickets in UK & Romania

As part of their long-standing support for the British film industry, Orange customers in the UK and Romania can treat themselves to a night at the cinema and bring a friend for free.

Solution:

• Flytxt’s Strategic Services Team worked with Orange’s marketing and sponsorship team to develop the concept and business case behind ‘Orange Wednesdays’.
• As lead consultant and technology provider, Flytxt implemented the proposed strategy end-to-end.
• On 31st March 2004, Orange launched a global first, rolling out a mobile loyalty campaign nationwide with over 2,000 mobile voucher redemption terminals deployed across the entire UK cinema industry, powered by Flytxt Reward. ‘Orange Wednesdays’ is a three year programme.
• The ‘Orange Wednesdays’ promotion allows Orange customers to redeem a ‘2-4-1’ offer for any cinema every Wednesday evening using vouchers delivered directly to their handsets.
• Flytxt’s strategic services team managed the entire project on behalf of Orange, including:

- POS Hardware supplier selection, integration and management

- Specification and development of server and client software

- Quality assurance and testing of all aspects of programme

- Development of logistical rollout strategy

- Weekly redemption reporting to all participants

- Monthly CRM reporting to all participants and

- Full end-2-end management of solution

• Orange customers request the offer by texting the keyword ‘film’ to the number ‘241’ or via WAP or IVR interface. In response, they receive a mobile voucher, containing a unique code, by SMS.

• All participating cinemas are equipped with redemption units behind the till allowing staff to check the unique codes on each mobile voucher to ensure its validity in real-time.

• Flytxt project managed the commissioning and installation of separate wireless redemption units. Each ‘Orange Box’ contains GPRS technology enabling them to communicate with a centralised Flytxt managed database to validate each mobile coupon in real-time.

• In September 2005, on the back of the overwhelming success of the UK service, Orange and Flytxt worked together once again to launch the service nationwide in Romania.

Introduction of Genre based dynamic reminder messaging

Background:
In May 2005, the technical viability of the multiple award winning Orange Wednesdays service had long been proven. Over 6 million Orange Wednesdays coupons had been processed and over 9 million requests managed by the Flytxt servers on behalf of Orange since inception of the service.

The key to the overall success of Orange Wednesdays, is its commercial viability in terms of brand awareness and reduction of churn for Orange and incremental cinema visits and breadth of films viewed for distributors and exhibitors.
To this end Flytxt undertook a programme looking at opportunities to optimise the Orange Wednesdays reminder mechanic. The aim of this was to increase the repeat usage of the service on following Wednesdays by changing the content and timing of reminder messages sent to requesters and redeemers.

The key hypotheses tested were whether a more relevant, timely or personal message would increase response rates for subsequent Orange Wednesdays. Orange also wanted to engage hundreds of thousands of new WAP users by driving them to targeted content based on their film recommendation.

Solution:

• Weekly reminders go out to all Orange Wednesday users from the previous week to encourage repeat visits to the cinema, and the viewing of a diverse range of films. The reminders place users in a genre based on previous Orange Wednesday viewing history and make a recommendation based on:

- Films showing that week

- Films on at the cinema visited by the user

- Films not yet viewed on Orange Wednesday by the user

• 28 months into the promotion, the popularity of Orange Wednesdays in the UK and Romania shows no sign of waning. In fact usage of the service continues to rise. The reminders aim to maintain and increase usage of the Orange Wednesdays service for the long term, by engaging users in communication that is both relevant and informative.

• WAP links to Orange World that give information on the films being recommended are dynamically inserted into each reminder message. This has proved a popular value added service to users whilst also growing the mobile Internet subscriber base by pushing users to Orange World.

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