MMA Case Study: Guinness St. Pat’s

Guinnesspubpinder
The brief

Guinness asked Marvellous
to develop a campaign to engage drinkers in the lead up to St.
Patrick’s Day 2008, one of the biggest party days of the year for
Guinness consumption. The campaign had to have credibility and
longevity beyond 17 March to justify investment, and therefore had to
be flexible enough to work across several of Guinness’s marketing
programmes.

Objectives
Guinness wanted to connect with its customers,
and get them involved with the brand on a deeper level than
straightforward consumption. By providing them with innovative on-brand
planning tools and entertainment, the mobile campaign created
“talkability” and encouraged fun, interaction and banter in the pub and
beyond. Guinness also wanted to use the campaign to promote its new
product, Guinness Red, and introduce it to traditional Guinness
drinkers and the wider market.

Strategy
The Guinness target audience of sport- and
style-aware 18-40 year olds is completely at home with mobile
technology, and relaxed about sophisticated digital interaction. Their
handsets are always on, always with them, and tend to be high end.
Consequently, Marvellous proposed a range of Java downloads to deliver
cutting edge brand engagement which would live on the phone and be
returned to many times.

Solution
Marvellous created a mobile destination site,
accessed via calls to action in press, radio, online and mobile media.
The site was designed to reflect and enhance the brand values of
Guinness, and bring these to a new and always-available medium.
Apart from basic information about Guinness and its products, the site housed several applications, including:

Pubfinder – this enables users to identify pubs via LBS, postcode or
area look-up. It can also find the nearest St. Pat’s party pub, the
nearest one with sports TV, or the nearest one serving Guinness Red.
Many pubs are independently reviewed and photographed and this database
is being extended all the time. Because the Pubfinder is a java
download, the data can be dynamically refreshed on the handset, keeping
it up to date and relevant.

119.5 Pub Quiz – a selection of four java quizzes where consumers
answer as many questions as possible in 119.5 seconds, the time it
takes to pour the perfect pint of Guinness. They could then submit
their scores to a national leaderboard, also accessible via Facebook,
with great Irish prizes for the top scorer.

Picture Gallery – St. Pat’s party-goers were asked to send in their
photos of the celebrations to the special shortcode, 81703.  There they
could view their own, their friends’ and a random selection of all
photos submitted. Again, the photographs could also be viewed on the
Guinness Facebook pages.

Results
The results were spectacular for a short-term
(2-week) campaign, and far exceeded the KPIs set by the client. More
than 30% of the 35,000+ unique users downloaded at least one of the
Java applications, with the quizzes proving particularly popular.
The
results also proved the effectiveness of clickthrough ads on mobile
portals, which delivered fantastic ROI compared to more traditional
channels. Research into the effectiveness of the mobile media banners
conducted for Vodafone live! by Dynamic Logic showed a 25% lift in
mobile ad awareness, 12% lift in brand favourability, and a 9% rise in
purchase intent, with a 3% clickthrough rate in certain areas.

Next Steps
Working with Marvellous, Guinness has updated
the St. Pats campaign site into a permanent mobile presence. The site
is now promoted in much of their above the line media and Guinness has
committed to include mobile in future campaigns.

MMA Viewpoint:
The
ubiquity of the mobile phone presents marketers with a new opportunity
to interact with consumers anytime, anywhere. Mobile provides the
ability to provide relevant and contextual information to target
consumers, whenever and wherever they are. This relevance, and ensuring
consumer pull, are the critical elements for a positive consumer
experience, repeat users and therefore successful mobile campaigns;
generating an environment of interaction and engagement between the
brand and consumer, rather than the interruption-based advertising
model of the past.
This Marvellous strategy for Guinness demonstrates a number of key themes for a successful mobile campaign:
·
Mobile is best leveraged when integrated into a cross media campaign,
with the call to action embedded in traditional and digital media
elements that you would already be using to reach the consumer.
·
Lead with the strategic objectives, then follow with the ideas where
mobile might fit, not the technology. Start with the consumer and ask
what you are trying to do – how are you trying to reach that consumer?
Then, the role of mobile media can enhance the strategic objectives.

·    Mobile should provide value to the user, in the form of
product and service enhancements, reminders, sweepstakes, contests,
requested information, entertainment, or discounts. The Pubfinder
application, quizzes and picture gallery are great examples of this.

As we can see from the results of this campaign, mobile marketing
enables brands to implement highly-targeted, measurable marketing
initiatives, and provides them with a unique opportunity to engage and
interact with consumers like never before.