Wild Explorers is a simple idea – a native smartphone app for iPhone and Android that uses the device in every parents’ pocket to inspire outdoor play.

But more than 90 per cent of brand apps get fewer than 10,000 downloads. To realise our ambitions, we needed to create an experience that was intuitive, engaging and genuinely useful.

We sourced content from The Wild Network – a social enterprise who helped create a range of activities for different age groups, locations, group sizes and weather conditions. We created a simple user interface, making it easy for parents to share the experience of finding and logging an activity with their children.

We let parents record and share their activities so we could track the impact the app was generating. And we created a bespoke CMS platform to allow our content team to create push notifications, prompting repeat usage and ongoing engagement.

Faced with a limited budget and a tight delivery schedule, we deployed a small agile team comprising a UX designer, a product owner and a developer. We used the Adobe Mobile framework to facilitate deployment to both the iOS and Android platforms, allowing us to produce a fully functional version of the app in just four weeks, and a full production release in six weeks.

The app launched in June 2016, and we worked with a cross agency team to create an integrated promotional campaign that included on-pack, in-store, experiential and social media activity.

We adopted the same agile approach to a targeted mobile downloads campaign, using the Tune in-app analytics SDK to continually optimise media spend across device, platform and creative execution. Specific app download partners such as Supersonic, Surikate and Linking Mobile were used - along with Facebook and Google - and we optimised to the best performing partners

• The Wild Explorers app was downloaded more than 125,000 times in just 3 months

• UK children have logged more than 72,000 additional hours of outdoor play via the app

• The app generated significant PR coverage in traditional media – but significantly, we also saw extensive organic coverage in influential parenting blogs and social media influencers

• Millward Brown research found a post-campaign uplift of more than ten per-cent in public sentiment positively associating child development with outside play

• The 2016 Dirt is Good campaign delivered a percentage point uplift in brand equity according to Millward Brown