Cider drinkers fail to send texts

A SOPHISTICATED mobile advertising campaign designed to encourage Brit pub-goers to switch to Strongbow cider, appears to have fallen flat. It seems only the INQ bothered to participate.

The perils of creating an elaborate promotion to get British drinkers to switch to drinking a popular brand of draught cider - Strongbow - can now been exposed here.

The promotion called for potential participants to text the word 'earn1' followed by their personal details to a shortcode number from their mobile phones. In return for this, they would be sent a voucher that would entitle them to a free pint of Strongbow.

Details of the promotion were made available here.

The most impressive part of this whole campaign was the clever use of location awareness. If the consumer texted the word 'pub' to the same shortcode, it returned the addresses of nearby establishments participating in the promotion.

That's because the system was using Cell ID techniques to the locate the origin of the text message. It worked well in our case but then we didn't check to see if 3 subscribers had the same luck.

At this point in the excercise, the harmful restrictions of the whole event kicked in. The voucher could only be redeemed on certain days during a very short period of time.

Consequently when the INQ arrived at the local pub on the last day of the promotion, we found that nobody at all had taken part . The landlady said that out of 80 pints that had been allocated to her established, only one pint (ours) had been claimed.

Awareness of the promotion might have been a factor although at least one member of the bar staff was actually wearing a T-shirt with the campaign's name – Bowtime- emblazoned across the front at the time.

A few discrete enquiries revealed that the regular drinkers had assumed that in order to participate in this promotion, they would be charged the standard rate to receive a premium rate text message – namely £1.50.

Given that the pint cost £3.20, the effort to acquire one already began to look a little pointless. Except that no such charges were levied. It was simply a misconception.

The INQ would praise the Scottish and Newcastle brewery for attempting to make intelligent use of mobile phones. However, awareness of what the campaign was and how it worked was almost non-existent.

Back to the drawing board, chaps. µ