What happens to a phone when you lose it? We set out to find out in The Lost Phone Experiment, by planting 100 phones throughout the Netherlands, and tracking their fortunes via a microsite, which, during the experiment, yielded live data about how many are returned, where they travel, what they are used for and by who. The experiment was the kick-of for a new Vodafone Service, Mobile Protect. By seeding the live dashboard via twitter and blogs, we got curious people to start following updates daily and. After the live event, a video of the experiment together with the end result on the microsite, was seeded to blogs and journalists.

After extensive testing of the app on the phones and building a website which showed all the data (including data coming from the backend of the Vodafone system in which we could track how long people were calling for and what numbers) we enrolled the Vodafone organization to help us drop the phones over the whole country. In cooperation with the PR agency, we made a list of types of places where phones should be left behind and after carefully selecting the right employees the experiment could start.

We didn’t send out a press-release until after the experiment was finished to make sure that the experiment wouldn’t be influenced by people ‘actively’ searching for phones and just waited for the phones to be returned, or for the battery to run dry.

The campaign ran according to plan and after 6 days we started drawing conclusions based on the gathered data.

During the 6 days of the experiment we had 10.000 visits on the website of which 7,500 uniques.

Average timespend of 4:37 on site.

25,000 views of the results video

In the two weeks after the experiment had ended we welcomed another 50,000 visits on the website.Although it wasn’t a goal, it resulted in an increase of 4% in downloads of the app among Vodafone clients.

Vodafone was invited to discuss the experiment on 2 national Dutch radio stations and the results of the experiment were placed in 4 national newspapers and 12 websites.

By choosing this approach Vodafone successfully asked for attention for an urgent issue from a personal security perspective involving the whole country in an innovative experiment.