Mobile Interactive Group (MIG) has picked up the Netimperative Digital Award for Best Use of Mobile for the text competition it delivered for the Live8 concert in Hyde Park in 2005. MIG won the award in the face of competition from Incentivated, ecourier and Inventa.
The objective for Live8 was to create a competition mechanic for the organisers to distribute thousands of tickets in a two week timeframe, while at the same time raising revenue to offset some of the costs of putting on the event and distributing the 130,000 tickets quickly and securely at low cost.
Within seven days the competition received over 2.1 million text message entries and raised over 3 million. The 66,500 winners were quickly notified via text message that they had won a pair of tickets and sent a unique PIN, that they registered on the O2 website, enabling them to collect their tickets from any O2 store.
MIGs high speed, high volume VoteWinner SMS platform was at the heart of the text ticket competition, which at its peak processed over 611 messages a second. The Live8 ticketing operation was also recorded by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest ever text competition.
Live8 was a one-off event and was arranged with incredibly tight deadlines says MIG Managing Director Barry Houlihan. It was therefore essential the competition mechanic was rapidly deployable, reliable, and able to scale to meet an unprecedented demand.