A trial of a Bluetooth enabled advertising campaign for Burger King carried out earlier this year at Luton Airport saw 2265 people download the offer pinged to their phone from a six-sheet billboard in the check-in hall, representing around 10% of people who received the initial Bluetooth nudge, M-Retailing.net understands.
Working with advertising company JC Decaux Airport and Hypertag, Burger King decided to try and use Bluetooth marketing for a 15% off promo deal to attract more customers to a tucked away outlet located between the check desks and the departures hall. Running between 17 December 2009 and 16 January this year, the Bluetooth enabled posted contacted some 20,000 passing people, with 2265 actually downloading the offer.
As to how many people actually then redeemed the offers at the Burger King branch is not being revealed, but Hypertag’s proximity marketing manager, Elliot Messenger, tells us that Burger King was pleased with the trial.
“What is interesting is that one person tried to redeem the offer at a Burger King in Manchester, showing that this form of marketing lives on in consumers’ minds much longer than paper vouchers,” says Messenger. “He couldn’t redeem it there, but it was interesting to note.”
On redemption, Messenger says that, because the Bluetooth trial was part of a wider newspaper and TV advertising campaign, the redemption mechanic was simple. “Burger King can centrally add a button to the checkout screen that the sales person just presses when presented with a voucher in whatever form,” he explains.”This makes implementation very easy. “
However, Hypertag recognises that the redemption issue is the key thing that will hold back widespread adoption of m-vouching. “We are at least three years away from any widespread adoption of this as the redemption technology isn’t cheap enough to appear in all shops. Personally, I think we will see big stores like Tesco and Asda doing this in the next two years, but until the technology is cheap it won’t be ubiquitous.”
