Blucasting on the streets of San Francisco

by: admin Friday, July 20th, 2007

Rating: anything to shout about?

California-based BlueFire Digital in conjunction with NextMedia Outdoor says its Bluetooth and SMS marketing campaign was a huge success for a women’s clothing retailer, lucy.

Hmmm. There might be a transatlantic mismatch in the defination of huge.

BlueFire Digital installed its BlueFire xMS Bluetooth access points at two ‘wallscapes’ in the streets of San Fransciso. The advertisements encouraged passers by to enable their Bluetooth phones or to opt-in via a text message to receive coupons for the shops on the phones. Bluetooth or SMS content was then pushed to them.

The three week long trials 46 users opted in by SMS and 41 by their Bluetooth enabled phones.

Crista Lindberg, director of marketing, for lucy said, “The programme drove sales directly to our store which was the objective, plus it gained us an immeasurable amount of brand awareness.”

They’d probably have got more people into the shops handing out leaflets, at a considerably smaller cost too.

3 Responses to “Blucasting on the streets of San Francisco”

H. Jay Patel Said:

Ms. Turner,
The venues for this campaign wasn’t busy as the “tube”. We weren’t handing out free tunes. In addition, campaign was directed solely at women. And instead of 20 or 200 locations, this was limited to only 2. Given all this constraints, the numbers were very good…so our definition of “huge” is , reasonably, same as UK.
Handing out leaflet is so yesterday and not environmentally friendly; which San Francisco is.

By the way love to hear your comments on BlueFire uTV.

Best,

H. Jay Patel

Comment made on August 14th, 2007 at 3:23 pm

H. Jay Patel Said:

One additional comment.
Labor cost for hiring someone to pass out leaflet is considerably higher that our products. Reasonable estimate to pass out leaflet for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week for 3 weeks at $12 hour, runs around $2500 USD plus ~15% for taxes.

The campaign cost from our was less than numbers above. Check out our website for pricing info.

Comment made on August 14th, 2007 at 3:32 pm

Annie Turner Said:

H. Jay Patel, thank you for your comments - most illuminating although i stick to my comments about the definition of huge, do agree about the leaflets!

best

Annie

Comment made on August 16th, 2007 at 12:48 pm