O2 to push its reward site to more brands

Rating: Oh, what a Top-up Surprise

Proud of its success with a campaign for movie rental service, Blockbuster, O2 has decided to poach four new sales staff from the likes of Yahoo! and Orange.

It’s hardly a surprise that O2 Media – the operator’s advertising arm – stole some-one from Orange given the close similarity between Top-Up Surprises and Orange’s Bright Top Ups.

Bright Top Ups is a text based reward system whereas Top-up Surprises relies on hits to the web site - topupsurprises.o2.co.uk.

O2 Media proudly boasts that – according to the Hitwise Entertainment - Competitions industry index - during the first six months of 2009, the Surprises web site was ranked Number One based on market share of visits among all United Kingdom websites.

What it would be very interesting to know is how many of these hits came from mobile subscribers surfing through the mobile internet and how many of these came via other ISPs?

According to O2 Media, 52 per cent of visitors chose to take up the Blockbuster campaign offer and of those 11 per cent have already redeemed the offer voucher.

Top-up Surprises surfers were offered a 30 day free trial of Blockbuster’s unlimited rental service, a £10 voucher to spend in a Blockbuster store or online and £1 off the monthly fee if they chose to take up the unlimited rental service.

Understandably, Gerry Butler, a senior vp with Blockbuster, commented, “We’ve been delighted by the response rates which exceeded our expectations. This has been one of our most successful acquisition campaigns to date.”

Generally speaking, Top-Up Surprises range from extra texts, picture messages and network minutes through to prizes like holidays, TVs and mobile phones.

Given O2’s close association with live music, it’s something of a surprise that gig tickets haven’t been more heavily featured.