2011 Silver Best use of mobile

Client V Festival

What is wonderful about this work? For the V Festival, we integrated smartphone technology with social media to solve big festival problems: what to pack; losing your friends and missing your favourite bands. A huge success! 44% downloaded the app and it proved to be the most useful festival tool, with 86% usage.

What details of the strategy make this a winning entry? We used technology to enhance the festival experience – and made it available to everyone! In a festival first, we developed across all platforms including Nokia, Blackberry, Android and iPhone. It not only overcame mobile signal and connection difficulties but also the many different platform-specific technologies. Fans had access to everything at their fingertips: an interactive map with accurate tent, car and Facebook friend-finder. Plus the full line-up, latest artist tweets and competitions, handy travel, weather and festival info. Fans could share their experiences on Twitter and Facebook then watch official interviews and acoustic sets on YouTube – all without leaving the app. Nokia owners had access to exclusive functionalities including a personalised schedule with essential clash-finder, Nokia Action Cam to share photos on Facebook and an exciting competition. Prizes included one that combined mobile app and Facebook technology as its entry mechanic.

How did creativity bring the strategy to life? Benchmarking against previous festival apps, we made sure that ours really pushed the technology boundaries, with interactive rich festival content. It used AGPS to pinpoint your location, your friends’ locations and your tent/car’s location in relation to stages, campsites and other main facilities. Anyone who’s been to a festival will understand that in a field of thousands of people, near-identical tents and cars, this is a godsend! Fans were able to experience and interact with site action through Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, creating a real sense of festival community. All important information was on the V Festival website, but this was less easy to access onsite, so we included it in the app to be seen anytime! Push notification allowed us to update fans instantly with essential information all weekend, including safety messages.

Results There were over 70,000 downloads: of the 160,000 fans attending we achieved a 44% download rate. 86% of downloaders used it onsite and 78% opened it five or more times, with 1,007,842 unique sessions! Fans particularly engaged with the map and friend-finder functionality, with over 300,000 page views. The Virgin Media Pitch Up For Prizes competition, where users uploaded a photo of their decorated tent, received thousands of entries from the app. Plus there were 4,227 other entries.

Team Karen Fielding, Richard Carter, Andrew Rourke, Ryan Yates, Sam Levy, Dan Metcalfe, Paul Glossop.