With the shortlist for the 2016 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards released earlier today, every day between now and the Awards Ceremony on 17 November, we will be previewing the finalists in each category, starting here with the Most Effective Mobile-first Service…

Camelot – The National Lottery Ticket Scanner
Launched in June, Camelot’s National Lottery Ticket Scanner enables Lottery players to quickly and easily check whether their ticket is a winner simply by scanning a QR Code on the ticket from within the National Lottery app. If the ticket is a winner, the scan also confirms the amount won and explains how to claim it.
Camelot knew from the off that customers liked the idea, with over 300,000 customers using the app to scan 940,000 tickets in the first week. Since then, the numbers have kept on rising, with over 10m ticket scans to date. Impressive numbers.

Nimbletank – Kobalt: The Future Of Music
The Kobalt app enables music creators and artists to see where their money is being made, down to the performance of individual songs, type of song, rights or country, all in real time. Since its launch, the app has smashed all its KPIs, and received rave reviews, both from the music press, and the artists themselves, with Jonny Quinn of Snow Patrol and Gary Go, artist, producer and songwriter for Rihanna and other artists, among those heaping praise on it. And despite the huge amount of data it allows artists to access, it’s very easy and intuitive to use.

Politico and Urban Airship – Politico’s EU Referendum Tracker
This is a very innovative use of wallet technology. In the run-up to the EU Referendum, Politico created the EU Referendum Tracker, which used an Apple Wallet pass to deliver content and notifications to iPhones. Once readers had installed the wallet pass, Politico’s European newsroom, working with Urban Airship, was able to send real-time content and notification alerts, informing pass-holders of key breaking news as it happened, and driving them to the pass which contained continuously updated story links.

The front of the pass featured graphics displaying polling results leading up to the 23 June vote, and then switched to display live results as they came in from 382 voting districts. The back of the pass provided summaries and links to Politico’s latest coverage.

In a single week between launch and the referendum vote, Politico surpassed its goal of gaining 10,000 pass-holders, representing 104 countries. The Tracker wallet pass was also successful in helping Politico acquire new readers, as nearly three quarters of registered pass users were new to the organization’s database.

Santander and Nimbletank – KiTTi: An Account for Groups
KiTTi is an easy way to create a collective pot of money with friends. It’s an account for groups, powered by mobile, created by Santander, working in partnership with Nimbletank. KiTTi’s aim is to make it easy for groups of people to collect money to be used for a common purpose, whether that’s paying a bunch of friends paying for a holiday or a football team organising a post-match curry.

The objective in creating KiTTi was to change behaviour and change cash as we know it. This meant moving from an un-met customer need, to an optimized commercial product, service, app and business. In doing so the measure of efficacy was user feedback, funnel performance and active KiTTis. In each of these respects, KiTTi has outperformed expectations.

SapientNitro – SpeakEmoji
SpeakEmoji is the world’s first voice-to-emoji translator. It was created by SapientNitro, initially as an self-promotional project, gifted to its clients – and the world – just before Christmas 2015. The objective was to entertain the company’s clients in a way that would demonstrate its technical creative skills and be picked up by industry press and the media.

Developers created a database matching thousands of keywords to emojis. They connected that to a voice-to-text API, wrote a proprietary search algorithm, and SpeakEmoji was born. Available on iOS, Android, and Chrome, it lets users create emoji messages by simply speaking into their smartphone.

The app went down a storm, with downloads peaking at over 10,000 a day in its first two weeks, and breaking into the top 20 social networking apps in the US. All by tapping into our new-found love of emoji’s in a clever and entertaining way.

Sliide Airtime – Sliide Airtime Africa
Sliide provides people with ad-funded access to the internet through their mobile phone in emerging economies, where the average cost of mobile data is disproportionately high compared to incomes.

Sliide Airtime launched Africa’s first lock screen content discovery platform in Nigeria in March 2016. The app provides people with a new way of accessing content from their mobile devices, while simultaneously earning free airtime. After entering information about their interests, users receive personalised content as soon as they wake their phone, including news and entertainment hand-picked from local and international media sources, as well as branded content and ads.

Sliide uses some of the revenue it earns from showing ads on the lock screen to buy mobile data from mobile operators. It then gives this mobile data back to its users, allowing them to access the internet for free, while providing advertisers with a new and unique platform to reach consumers through their most prized and most frequently used device.

While the numbers are confidential, they were shared with our judges, and were impressive enough to earn Sliide a place on the shortlist.

Our Award winners will be announced at the Awards Ceremony in London on 17 November. To book a seat or table, head for the Awards website or call John Owen on 07769 674824.