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New Media
WINNER
Live8 Text Ticketing
Cohn & Wolfe and O2 in-house team
O2's ticketing campaign for Live8 was so successful that it made it into the Guinness Book of World Records as the globe's largest text-message lottery. And it raised more than £3m for charity to boot.
It was O2's strong involvement with the music industry that prompted it to create 'the ultimate competition' to distribute tickets for Live 8, support the Make Poverty History campaign and raise awareness of Third World debt prior to the G8 summit in Gleneagles last year.
The strategy, which was conceived by an in-house team at O2 and Cohn & Wolfe, was to spark awareness of the Live8 event through mobile phone texting, as well as to ensure that coverage continued in the run-up to the event, while creating a sense of occasion.
Recognising that mobiles are ubiquitous in the UK, the team focused on demonstrating how the technology can be used for social good, and not merely as a means of downloading ringtones and games. It opened up a UK-wide competition, tempting people to enter and win some of the 130,000 tickets available for the London Hyde Park show.
With less than a month to go, a press conference was held, with Bob Geldof announcing the O2 ticketing process whereby people - no matter which mobile network they subscribed to - could answer a multiple-choice question related to Live8 for a chance to win tickets.
The team also organised ticket collection events at certain flagship O2 stores throughout the UK, with broadcasters and photographers capturing the words and images of the first winners to pick up their tickets. This resulted in further national and regional coverage of Live8, with text-related facts and figures cited in reports, alongside O2's branding and messaging.
This campaign was also noteable for the challenges it surmounted, including a negative Evening Standard front-page article on the ticketing process. Cohn & Wolfe secured an apology from the paper, with O2 follow-up statements, key messages and information on the correct costs and level of donation all distributed to other national newspapers and broadcasters.
Distributing tickets through the text process was a first for O2, and it was so successful (at its peak, O2's system received 611 messages a second), that text ticketing has become a key part of O2's music strategy. It was used in this summer's O2 Wireless Festival, where more than £100,000 worth of mobile tickets were sold in the first week.
Coverage of the Live8 campaign included 53 branded print media articles and more than 100 pieces of broadcast coverage with an AVE of £1m. O2's involvement and key messages appeared in all of the coverage.
FINALISTS
Chataboutmoney.co.uk
Lansons Communications
Don't Hide It
NSPCC
