V Festival: 'Festival Buddy' mobile app = complete rip off...

Along with around thirty thousand other people, I attended V Festival on Saturday.

It was an awesome day with a great line up, great atmosphere and great weather.
The only three things that pissed me off on the day were the following:

1). Huge queues (up to and over an hour long)at the beer tents stemming from not enough beer tents!
2). Scheduling ERROR by not putting Snow Patrol on the main stage
3). The 'Festival Buddy' mobile application

I am unfortunately unable to make suggestions regarding Beer Tents and Line Ups because i am not an Event Organiser, but, may i suggest that next time around you increase the alcohol accessibility and do not make us walk 15 minutes from one stage to another to see equally brilliant bands which results in us missing some of the performances.....that sucked.

However my real gripe that i can whinge about was around the 'Festival Buddy' mobile application.
When i first saw this on the map print outs & line up guides i was so excited that they had finally utlised the mobile device in the perfect way.

The application allowed festival goers on any network to find line-up information, create a personal schedule, find site-specific information, and download free V Festival related content including ringtones, wallpapers and videos by simply texting a shortcode to get the download.

Sounds great right?

Wrong.

'Festival Buddy' is marketed as a 'FREE' downloadable tool which is easy to use - but what they neglected to widely promote is that fact that each update text you recieve throughout the day will cost you 55 cents PLUS there is no cap on how many of these texts you will recieve as updates are unlimited!

To add to this if you are not with Virgin Mobile (the majority of the Sydney population) then you will be charged data costs for any downloads you perform.

Perfect! So i can keep up to date on what's going on and who is on which stage but at the same time i'll be rinsing my mobile bill!

My first thought on having discovered this: 'you tight bastards....'

Every single person there (not including freebie tickets of course) had shelled out circa $140 for a ticket which is alot of money, so i don't think i'm alone in thinking that the Festival Buddy service really should have been free for each & every attendee as an added benefit within the ticket cost.

How hard would it have been to have a quick chat with the main mobile carriers and have the WAP site, data downloads & SMS zero-rated? Honestly?

Paul Shulver, music sponsorship manager for Virgin Mobile said “The Festival Buddy offers the chance for V Festival attendees to completely tailor-make their festival experience.”

Well Mr Shulver, the 'Festival Buddy' left a slightly sour note to my experience because in my view it was total rip off.

TED Talk: Evan Williams: How Twitter's spectacular growth is being driven by unexpected uses

A talk given by Evan Williams, the genius co-founder of Twitter & Blogger.com at TED.






Amazing stats:

- 47 members of US Congress have Twitter Accounts

- Twitter originally setup as a side project to Odeo

- It was just a broadcast platform, the @ replies were built much later on...

- Platform has evolved from originally being used to keep up with family and friends to now being utilised as a mass communication device upon which people help eachother out

- Evan Williams: "when you give people easier ways to share information, more good things happen"

Our Identity In Flux & The Role Brands Can Play - Very simple but succinct video...

Our Identity in Flux and the Role Brands Can Play from Amanda Mooney on Vimeo.

Hilarious Twitter cartoon....you must watch this!

British Government to appoint a digital champion!

The british government is looking to appoint a high-profile person to promote the benefits of using digital technologies to all citizens.

The digital champion will take responsibility for encouraging people to use digital technology.

The call was made today by minister for digital inclusion Paul Murphy MP at the GovNet Communications' Mobile Government conference.

Murphy said that 17m people in the UK were currently digitally excluded thus missing out on opportunities of education, communication and entertainment.

He added that young people without access to digital technology were likely to suffer, particularly within their careers where 90% of job applications are now done online.

Go Britain!

Bravo!

I just wanted to say that i love this new campaign from Amnesia for Aussie Home Loans.

I think it's an excellent example of how to turn a creative idea into a fantastic digital campaign execution which is traditionally really bloody difficult because you're doing it backwards! (execution should technically come before creative)...

I am not sure how many of you are familiar with the current TV ad for Aussie Home Loans where they have a mortgage broker jumping out of a plane with the claim of being able to offer a better home loan deal wherever he should land or give you $300.

Well Amnesia had the idea of turning this into a reality.

So they found Duane Brown who is an actual Aussie Home Loans mortgage broker and asked him how he would feel about jumping out of a plane...he said yes (crazy man!) and thus the Freefall Challenge was created.

On April 6th Duane will be throwing himself out of an aeroplane in the hope of landing on the doorstep of an unsuspecting (but nevertheless needy) homeowner whom he can help by getting them a better deal on their home loan.

Now comes the exciting part, (as if it's not already merited it's own reality TV show), we can all get involved! On the Freefall Challenge website we can take a guess as to where Duane may land once he takes to the skies, and if we get it right we can win $3,000.

Now, Australia is a big place so pin-pointing Duanes landing could be pretty difficult... but those folks at Amnesia have offered a helping hand by seeding bonus codes via Duanes Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Youtube profiles which will give clues as to whereabouts it could be.

The execution is interactive, engaging, open to everyone & provides an excellent 'social objects' in regards to it's talkability, competition elements, videos, Twitter updates and sheer craziness...throwing a monetary prize in is just a bonus!

Well done to Amnesia for coming up with a great idea and well done to the client, Aussie Home Loans, for having the guts to do it.

Links to the campaign microsite & Duanes youtube channel are below:

http://www.youtube.com/duanejumps
http://www.aussiefreefallchallenge.com.au/

Syndication is the future...

I was reading this week that Virgin Media, Yahoo & Sky in the UK are planning to follow in Google's gigantic footsteps to develop tools to allow people to tailor & personalise their homepages in a (desperate) bid to generate customer loyalty....

My first thought on this is: 'why bother'?

RSS Feeds, Widgets and Social Network apps already allow people to source and collate the content they want so why would they want to do the same but be limited to the Virgin Media homepage or the Yahoo homepage or the Sky homepage?

Their goal is to encourage stickiness and boost interaction which in turn, they are hoping, will drive ad revenue. They have already tied in UK advertisers such as Money Supermarket and CareerBuilder to take the newly created commercial spots that fit in with the new design - but honestly, who wants ads on their personalised homepage? I certainly wouldn't....

I can understand their plight with dwindling audience figures and subsequent dwindling ad revenues - desperate times call for desperate measures but i am not convinced that the 'personalisation' of their homepages is the best course of action.

Now i am not going to claim to be able to solve the critical business issues these corporations are struggling with but what i can do is talk about an example of how another corporation has approached this issue.

The BBC is percieved as one of the most conservative corporations on the planet, yet they have been quietly embarking on an exciting strategic evolution which is quickly turning them into one of the worlds most forward thinking content publishers.....

In an uncharacteristic turn of events, the BBC have demonstrated an impressive and thorough understanding of our changing communications landscape.They have parted ways with their traditional british pride and relinquished control over their content.

Syndication and distribution is the new name of the game and the BBC are leading the pack. BBC Worldwide content is now widely available across the web which they have understood is entirely neccessary to reach potential users who are increasingly unlikely to come directly to BBC Worldwide’s own sites, however, they have also understood the potential commercial gains..

In February 2007 BBC Worldwide became the first global broadcaster to partner with YouTube, and in January 2008 it secured a worldwide deal with MySpace to provide clips of BBC content to MySpace TV. It also signed an agreement in the UK to sell BBC programmes on a download-to-own basis via Apple iTunes, a deal repeated in the US and which will be replicated in other territories around the world. Another deal was struck with Sony Playstation for Top Gear to be downloaded through Gran Turismo TV. Such agreements have helped to establish BBC Worldwide as a leading content distributor for both BBC and independently produced content on digital platforms and they do not require people to directly visit the BBC website in order to have a BBC brand experience...

So as i said, whilst i cannot claim to be able to solve the business issues that some content providers are facing i can attempt to point them in the right direction and that is away from trying to fence in audiences and away from requiring people to visit their websites directly...

For example - Sky does have some cool tools they are planning to integrate such as 'Never Miss' which launched recently - a TV reminder service to cater to its online subscribers to remind them to record their favourite shows when they are coming up - but i still don't believe they need to house this within a homepage, why not turn it into an RSS feed or widget that can be taken and utilised anywhere?

Lesson of the day: Capitalise on fragmentation and syndicate like crazy!