Mobile coupons help sell your Mother for Sprite

A highly successful and highly peculiar mobile advertising campaign has just finished in Scandinavia. Run by the Coca Cola corporation, it used mobile internet coupons to allow participants to sell their mothers in return for free Sprite. The campaign was called Sell Your Mother, surprisingly

….what?

The actual process of the campaign isn’t hugely important in this case: you submitted a picture of your mother on-line, and recieved a mobile coupon in return for your troubles (and possible scolding if you didn’t warn her beforehand). You can then go to any shop that sells Sprite, and redeem that coupon for a free bottle. The more interesting parts are that 1) the coupon wasn’t sent to your phone via SMS or MMS – you had to have a data connection to access this and 2) the coupons were redeemed on your device, not by a device at the shop.

How did it go?

Coca Cola is claiming that this campaign got one of the highest response rates in the history of mobile coupons, despite being completely 3G-based. The coupons saw a 28% redemption rate.

The campaign was organised and run by Denmaker-based mobile coupon company ScreenTicket. It uses a service called On Device Verification, where the coupon is redeemed on the device itself at the store. This means that Screenticket is able to verify the exact number of coupons redeemed. It also means that the stores themselves don’t need any hardware to verify the coupon and give out a free bottle of Sprite – which is important when you want to run a coupon campaign that needs to work in any shop.

Other stats:

Total coupons sent: 4531
Total coupons open on the phone: 2051
Total coupons redeemed for a Sprite: 1279
Total times the coupon was viewed: 8499
Redeeming rate: 28%

What we think?

I can think of another reason that so many of these coupons were redeemed – if you had to submit a picture of your mom on-line to get it, you’re pretty likely to use that coupon. But on a more serious note, I’ve sent an email to ScreenTicket to get a better idea of how the On Device Verification system works. If it’s a good system then it could be a real step forward for mobile coupons. Having to install special hardware has been a real block to coupons so far – although a few large retail chains, notably Target in the USA, has taken that step.