Events guides via mobile: Guinness Hong Kong and Virgin Australia

One of the mobile marketing and advertising related ideas that I discuss in the new eBook (Pearls Vol 1: Mobile Advertising) is the free guide to a given event. This is a good instance of engagement marketing, and a more intensive and yet more useful and more practical way to do marketing on a mobile phone, than basic banner ads and spam text messages.

The service in the eBook that is a current Pearl, is the Virgin Festivals application, that was developed by Tiger Spike in Australia and used for the first time last summer with the Virgin Festival in Australia. The application was a simple download compatible with 250 phone models in Australia, and included a map of the festival area and the schedule of the artists that were performing. These could be on any printed guide, so very predictable. The more innovative parts were that they had alearts to let the fans know what artist would perform next and offered a mobile commerce site, to allow fans to purchase festival related merchandise including that of the various artists who performed. The Virgin Festival Buddy was described at MobiAd News. This is one of the last Pearls in the book (Pearl number 48 out of 50).

The service has similarity with the Guinness Sevens application from the spring of 2008 and developed by OgilvyOne. The Sevens is a rugby tournament held in Hong Kong and Guinness offered a tournament-related tourist guide to Hong Kong. It gave the obvious Sevens related info like schedules and scores, and yes, the obvious Guinness parts to Hong Kong tourists - helping tourists find the nearest pub or bar that served Guinness of course. But it also included a very clever translation utility, of short phrases spoken in Cantonese, so the English-speaking tourist phone owner could make very basic statements to those in Hong Kong who don't speak any English (like taxi drivers). The Guinness app was described at Marketing Interactive last March. Obviously as these two services were so similar, I did not include both in the eBook.

I expect we'll see more of these kinds of engagement marketing initiatives during 2009. We'll keep monitoring them. If you'd like to sample a few pages and Pearls from the new eBook, stop by at this link: Tomi's new eBook, Pearls Vol 1: Mobile Advertising.