| Games Without Frontiers? |
| Friday, 10 September 2004 | |
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With mobile phones emerging as a key gaming access
route, brand- owners are recognising the potential for the text-to-win
mechanic to evolve into something far more dynamic. David Reed reports. Brands have long since recognised this and latched onto mobile content for promotional purposes. Ringtones or games can ensure users become involved with the brand. Text-to-win promotions in particular have been able to leverage the perceived high value of this content, for which mobile users may pay between £2 and £6. Prize draws could also evolve a stage further, opening the way for mobile gaming. To lawyers, gaming means betting, but to mobile users it means playing games. Curiously, these two definitions are converging as phone-based gambling grows and starts to offer content - including games - as an alternative prize to cash. Changes to the law could lead to a major boom in this area. A new Gambling Bill, scheduled for inclusion in the Queen's Speech this autumn, includes provision for new remote gambling licences to regulate Internet casinos. These licences will allow registered players to place bets via their mobile. The result could be an expansion in the number of licence holders - and opportunities for brands to get involved with real gaming. Some have already tested the water. Holsten Pils teamed up with Sky Bet during Euro 2004 to offer free bets as part of a promotional campaign (PM April 30). Every time a consumer bought two bottles of the beer in an on-trade outlet they received a card giving them a complementary bet worth between £3 and £20. These were phoned through to Sky Bet's call centre and the winnings paid onto the gambler's debit card. "Holsten had no official connection to football, apart from sponsoring Tottenham Hotspur," says Paul Vines, managing partner at Meerkat Marketing, which created the campaign. "You have to be careful how you bring football into promotions where you don't have an approved sponsorship, as rights holders are very sensitive. Similarly, Sky TV wasn't broadcasting the tournament." The marriage of these two non-participants in the competition provided both a unique chance to leverage interest in the event among a core audience. For Holsten, luring young adult drinkers is critical, and they are also an important gambler demographic. Allowing bets to be laid by phone was central to the promotion's success. "We looked at linking up with betting shops. But using Sky Bet meant pub landlords were happy because drinkers didn't have to visit the bookies. It created noise around football, without having to pay to be an official sponsor," he says. Sky Bet also offered callers a 50 per cent discount on their next bet up to £20, meaning it also built a new set of customers. Holsten's marketing leveraged an existing method of betting, but expanded the reach to consumers who might not have previously 'gamed' in this way. But other brand promotions have been using new techniques and channels that create the gaming habit from scratch. Text-to-win has rapidly become a standard mechanic, fuelled by the early success of some large-scale campaigns. The technique leverages the existing prize draw format, which allows competitions, provided there is a free entry route alongside the proof-of-purchase. This conventionally means consumers can post in their name and address to be included in the draw, without having to buy the product. It keeps the activity within existing lottery laws, which forbid any paid-for draw apart from the National Lottery. The low cost of a simple text is seen as comparable to the price of a stamp, making text-to-win legitimate. Cadbury has run an on-pack promotion across ten brands. Over 65 million chocolate bar wrappers carried special codes that consumers were invited to text to a short code number. They then received a text telling them if they had won up to £5,000 in cash, a TV, PlayStation, Palm Pilot or CD compilation. "It got an 8 per cent response rate, which is outrageous. The main reason was its novelty," says Adhish Kulkarni, director of strategy and insight at Flytxt, which conceived the campaign - the first time text-to-win had been used. "It meant there were those four or five seconds when the consumer was interacting with the brand. Having sent their text, they were waiting for a reply. Don't treat that lightly." Kulkarni says the promotion made consumer goods brands wake up to the potential of this mechanic, leading to many imitations which have diluted its potency. As a result, campaigns have to be more creative to succeed. His agency turned up the heat with a promotion for WKD that uses the theme 'text to win a strip'. Bottles featured a woman whose top was peeled away to reveal a special code. Consumers texted this to a premium rate number for the chance to win a football strip, along with a wide range of other prizes. The response rate was an impressive 3 per cent. "It almost paid for itself," says Kulkarni. "That brought up the conversation about whether you can do self-liquidating campaigns in a similar way?" Many offline promotions have been able to cover their costs, either through using premium rate phone lines - asking for contributions to the cost of merchandise - or by a range of other mechanisms. The fact that mobile calls could offer the same opportunity is very attractive. With the rise in penetration of MMS handsets, this could be a breakthrough moment for promotions. Either through revenue sharing from calls, or getting consumers to buy additional services, the mobile might become a self-liquidating channel. "In the 18 to 34 age group, one in two people already have a MMS phone," points out Jeremy Wright, co-founder of Enpocket. Enpocket provides mobile marketing content and services that has been used by major mobile network operators including Vodafone, O2 and Orange. They have been focusing on encouraging consumers to make use of their phone's rich media potential. Orange's 'Expressionist' campaign at the end of last year challenged mobile users to take photographs of themselves showing one of nine different facial expressions, ranging from happy to scared. The photos were uploaded to a website, and users invited to vote for the best pictures. The winners were awarded prizes ranging from a Red Letter Day to a Panasonic handset. This was followed up in August by the 'Snap Shot' campaign, in which photos of particular themes, such as 'the best part of your day', were submitted. "It was about getting people over the hurdle of the technology. The prizes were not as important - it was about social interaction," says Wright. With network operators creating this kind of lure for new services, brand-owners should be able to follow through in their marketing activity. This could be vital because, as Dominic Collins, commercial director of digital marketing agency Buongiorno, says: "There is text-to-win fatigue, compared with one or two years ago, in terms of what advertisers are having to do." One solution is to offer downloads - such as ringtones, wallpapers or Java-based games - to consumers who respond to a promotion. "Mobile content as a text-to-win mechanic allows a higher win ratio, giving away more at a low cost," says Collins. Rewards have been common in offline promotions, but the cost of delivering them to consumers has often exceeded their actual value. The advantage of mobile content is that it is cheap to deliver and produce, but has a high perceived value. "Twice as many ringtones are sold as CDs - it is a large market," he says. Last year, the mobile download market was worth $323m (£180m), but is forecast by Ovum to leap to $766m (£428m) by 2005. One of the problems has been that promoters have simply added texting to existing campaigns. But as Ian Milligan, commercial director of mobile games and gambling specialist Million-2-1, says: "Old coupon-style promotional mechanics are tired and have failed to transfer across to new media." Another issue is that many of the promotions are not sufficiently transparent about their costs or odds. This has raised the spectre of regulators taking a firmer hand. "Come the autumn, the Gambling Bill is expected to tighten regulations still further, and should also restrict competitions which are effectively lotteries masquerading as skill-based competitions," he says. More complex and involving mechanics are emerging. One example is the reverse auction. Million-2-1 has run these under the 'How Lo' banner for a range of brands, including a recent campaign for the new Renault Clio, which involved a tie-in with Arsenal Football Club. "For a consumer audience deluged with competitions and promotions, reverse auctions offer a chance for real interactivity and fun. Instead of completing a tedious coupon - or correctly guessing that the capital of France is Paris - consumers text a bid in pence for the item they want to win. The lowest unique bid at the end of the auction wins," says Milligan. Remote gambling licence holders are likely to have bigger opportunities. Using mobiles as the access and gaming device is very appealing - and can be highly profitable. Chimaera Games is a start-up which has just received its gaming licence. It will shortly launch instant scratchcard games which are played by phone. Gamers deposit funds into a registered account and then buy cards which have a 1:10 chance of winning £10. "We are offering a lot of secondary prizes, too, such as wallpapers, ringtones and games. They have a high perceived value, so a consumer who spends £5 on ten 50p cards is guaranteed to win at least one prize with a perceived value of up to £6," says managing director Rick Brownlow. Brownlow says that gaining a licence was easier than he anticipated. It has been more difficult to get content providers to understand the business model. "Their business is about selling something to a consumer once for £5. We give back 95 per cent of the £5 - but then the consumer keeps playing until they come out with nothing," he says. Security is a big concern for regulators, especially ensuring that the under-aged do not get drawn into gaming via easy access devices like the Internet or mobile phones. Ensuring this does not happen is a big technical headache for licence holders. But new technologies are coming on stream that will help. "We are in the middle of developing a new product structure that provides an enforcement layer. It enables an operator to set policies and security rules in one place, as opposed to having them applied at each different service," says David Leichner, vice-president of marketing at Cash-U Mobile Technologies. When it is introduced next year, the new system will mean that a gaming licence holder can maintain one central set of business rules and security checks. Each separate game can then be controlled to a common standard. That removes the obstacle of having to check players separately for each bet, rather than treating them as regular customers who might play across a range of games. The final structure of the new Gambling Bill is still being debated. But one thing is clear: there will be more legitimate ways of gaming than ever before. Mobiles could become a key access route, alongside the Internet. For brand-owners, this could mean the text-to-win mechanic evolving into something far more dynamic and involving. © Copyright Flytxt Ltd 2006. Unauthorized use of any content constitutes a material breach. |
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