Branded Content is still in its infancy in Australia, a relatively small market of just over 20million people. Most marketers still regard TV advertising as the strongest media. However, Australia has one of the highest instances of smart phone useage in the world, making it an ideal market for mobile-based branded entertainment.

Our solution was a mobile app-based alternative reality game called ‘Game of Phones’. Prizes were geo-cached throughout Australia’s major cities. To claim a prize, players had to reach a prize location first. To keep it, they had to prevent nearby players from ‘stealing’ their prize for 48 hours. In a world-first, we used dynamic digital posters and mobile GPS tracking to communicate with game players in real time.

Over 3 weeks, 40,000 active players travelled over 230,000 KM’s with prizes, the equivalent of 6 times around the world. The 531 prizes were stolen 82,395 times; an average of 155 steals per prize. The average time playing was 1hr and 12 minutes per active user. Our campaign generated huge interest in Virgin Mobile with 103+ million online impressions, 76,200 visited Facebook tab (50% on mobile), 12,992 social shares & 66% positive online sentiment. It was a Top 20 App on the Android store. Virgin Mobile experienced a 29% uplift in post-paid sales during the campaign period.