In Australia, as it is in the rest of the world, young people are obsessed with their mobile devices. They use it to connect with friends and we wanted to give them content that will strengthen that relationship with them and Virgin Mobile. The difficulty is that content is targeted at the mass level, and in this situation (from a technology standpoint) we saw an opportunity to build the technology to create directly personalized experiences for the niche that would expand out to the masses. The goal was to create real-time entertainment, and that is what we did for Virgin Mobile’s Game of Phones.

With mobile handsets as weapons, we endeavored to turn the media landscape into a battleground like no other. We needed to be in constant communication with our warriors on the ground.

We brought outdoor media into battle and created real-time targeting and messaging - a world first. Working with OOH, we created a dashboard that allowed us to control panels individually, or as a group, so we could push game messages out to specific players, anywhere in real-time.

Social media, radio and retail stores acting as ‘safe houses’ were used to communicate with players over the three weeks of gameplay.

In the first week, the app secured over 40,000 downloads, pushing it to the top 15 apps on Android. Over 39,000 users played more than 65,000 sessions.

The 531 prizes were stolen over 82,000 times. Nearly 240,000 kilometers were travelled and over 14,000 players entered Virgin Mobile stores for up to an hour at a time. This interaction cleverly built relationships between consumers and the brand.

The Game of Phones winner won $50,000 and the campaign not only got thousands of young people involved in Virgin Mobile, but secured extreme popularity, loyalty and equity for the brand.