Our millennial target needed to notice us so we had to get their attention in a new way. The mobile screen is the most viewed screen amongst our target so a mobile activation was required.

We upgraded the standard ice-cream truck to a more sophisticated vehicle that communicated to customers in a new way that mattered most to them – through their mobile phone.

Our mission was to change the way people normally engage with ice cream trucks. Instead of it being through ice-cream truck music, we wanted to modernize it and have it be through their mobile phones using beacon technology.

The execution was a ‘reverse engineered beacon’ approach. Beacons typically stay in a fixed spot, such as a store location. We upgraded the ice-cream truck simply by attaching two beacons to the vehicle, making them truly ‘mobile’ beacons.

This was a first ever!

We attached two beacons to the ice-cream truck and activated them so they could begin sending push notifications.

The push notifications from beacons were triggered using Bluetooth low energy (BTE) to transmit data over short distances and ‘talk’ to other Bluetooth enabled devices such as mobile phones that are ‘listening’. This allows for super hyper-local messaging to consumers.

When the truck entered a populated area en route to an event, the beacons sent consumers who were within a radius of 100 feet of the truck, push notifications from trusted apps installed on their mobile device. This provided a one-to-one message that, when engaged with, provided consumers with the location of the truck to get their free McFlurry.

With these two integrated tactics, we changed the conventional draw to an ice cream truck through mobile push notifications over the course of 7 weeks at 13 different individual locations in Canada.

Starting on the East Coast of Canada in Bathurst, Nova Scotia, the birthplace of the McFlurry and ending on the West Coast in B.C., the beacon-enabled truck was activated in 13 populous locations nationwide.

The overall average engagement rate with the push notifications was 26%, meaning one in every four people who got a push notification from the beacon enabled truck engaged with the message.

Furthermore, 58% of users who engaged with the notification went to the trucks location for a sample of a free McFlurry. This is almost two thirds of the users which proves and demonstrates the power of beacon technology successfully drove users to the truck experience.

Ultimately, all of the activity in this campaign helped to achieve the business challenge of improving sales, by driving a 5% lift in McFlurry sales versus July 2014.