With just six business days between now and the 2011 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony, headline-sponsored by Upstream, we continue our preview of the finalists in each category with a look at the entries shortlisted for the Most Effective Campaign from a Mobile Operator.

The Awards Ceremony takes place in London on 3 November. If you havent yet booked your place at the event, theres still time – but tickets are selling fast. Right now though, lets take a look at the companies and campaigns vying for the honours in the Operator Campaign category, in alphabetical order.

BigTime/MTN Zambia Mega Millions Promotion
The MTN Mega Millions SMS promotion was designed as an interactive trivia game for customers of Zambian operator MTN. Participants were challenged with questions sent via SMS. Correct answers garnered reward points, which could be accumulated and used as entries into draws for promotional prizes.

All participants had the chance to win cash prizes – one winner was drawn each day, who won 1m Zambian Kwacha (£135), while weekly draws awarded K10m and the final draw awarded K100m.

The promotion was designed to stimulate and create sophisticated mobile interaction between MTN and its customers. The promotion also served to gather personalised qualitative information from subscribers, to be used by MTN in future communications with them.

Buongiorno – Recharge and Win
Recharge and Win is a fully managed revenue stimulation and loyalty proposition for operators from Buongiorno. It rewards prepay customers in real time as they transact with the network. When the customer buys top-up credit, a code is sent to their phone, which is entered into a fun web or WAP game. Upon entering the code and playing the game, the customer receives a prize, such as free texts or talk time, physical prizes, or entries into a grand prize draw.

Recharge and Win campaigns increase the amount and frequency of monthly tops ups, reduce churn, increase customer satisfaction, and allow for data capture. The likes of O2 UK and O2 Germany, Optus Australia, Proximus Belguim and TIM Italy have run Recharge and Win campaigns, with an average 30 per cent redemption rate.

Future Platforms/Orange – Official Glastonbury App
The only official app for this year’s Glastonbury festival, Glastonbury 2011 from Orange aimed to genuinely help festival-goers get the most from the event. Built by Future Platforms, the app featured a customisable schedule section, with full stage time listings, allowing attendees to plan which acts they wanted to see. The planner alerted users to any clashes, and reminded them when their favourite acts were about to appear on stage. Users could also share their schedule with friends via Facebook. The app was also able to send live festival news, such as stage changes, special guests and safety messages straight to users’ handsets.

A map feature was fully Assisted-GPS-enabled, and displayed live information on who was playing now and next on each stage. Sharing your feelings on the map created a ‘mood map’ of the festival – showing users where the buzz was on site.

Orange Romania/Velti – A New Day, a New Life
A large-scale Christmas-themed campaign for Orange Romania customers, A New Day, A New Life used both Q&A and draw mechanisms to build the subscriber database, and interact with customers in a fun way.

Working with mobile marketing company Velti, Orange set up a large-scale SMS campaign, drawing in customers via above-the-line advertising. Once a participant entered the campaign, they were sent a sequence of trivia questions. For each correct answer, sent via SMS, the participant received points, which represented entries into a draw that took place at the end of the campaign.

Extra prizes were made available for a separate, top-up-based game. Segmentation of previous and new players was built into the campaign, and extra prizes, such as high-profile gadgets, petrol vouchers and supermarket vouchers, were offered over the course of the campaign.

Saudi Telecom Company/Upstream – 100 BMW X5 *100 Days
The ‘100 BMW X5 *100 Days’ was a promotional campaign undertaken by Upstream on behalf of Saudi Telecom Company (STC), Saudi Arabia’s leading telecoms provider. The campaign was the first of its kind to run in Saudi Arabia.

Made possible by Upstream’s Marketing Communications Suite (MCS), it aimed to reward and engage existing customers, increasing loyalty and reinforcing the brand’s prestige. It also aimed to increase revenue for STC, while keeping within Sharia law.
The promotion gave STC’s entire wireless subscriber base of 22m consumers the chance to opt into a trivia-based mobile marketing promotion, in which correct answers garnered credits towards digital content, and further opportunities to enter a daily draw to win a BMW X5. Consumers were engaged via messages sent to their mobile phone. The campaign ran for 100 days, with a new car given away every day, for the duration of the campaign.

To book your place at the Awards Ceremony, please email john.owen@mobilemarketingmagazine.com or telephone +44 (0) 77696 74824. The event is strictly limited to 250 people. Tables of 10 cost £2,050, while individual seats are priced at £225.

And dont forget theres a native iOS app, a hybrid Android app, and a web app for other platforms, for the event. More details on that here.