Orange Spot the Welly for Glastonbury (screenshot from site)

As well as the contest, if you already have tickets, you can take advantage of their GlastoNav an augmented reality app, which will display events and locations on the site. It’s definitely available for the iPhone and probably for other smartphones, but they’ve not yet confirmed listings. They’re providing charging stations on site as well.

So it’s a mixture of a digital contest, mobile app and on-site experiential offering, there’s going to be a blog at some point; there’s no facebook page except for the ‘Like’ button. There’s also no mobile version of the site, nor embeddable widget, so it’s been slimmed down a lot since last year. Another area that’s been changed is the promotion. Last year, personal email, this year, an impersonal press release from M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment. Still a good contest, it just feels a lot less friendly and quirky than last year, the brand putting up shutters.

Update: I’ve received an email from the team apologising for the lack of contact; they’re working their way through emails at the moment and not got to me yet. Having had to do this in the past, I can understand the time taken to do a good job with outreach. So, they are being personal still which is great, far better to do this than stick with press release language.

This week, Domino’s announce their own Foursquare promotion in the UK. Slightly less glamorous than designer shoes, NMA are reporting that mayors of their restaurants can get free pizza once a week; if you’re just a member of Foursquare, you can get a free side dish. I wish I knew more, but the Domino’s site has no information visible.

Regardless of the lack of promotion anywhere I can find, I like this idea. In the US, locations like Starbucks are already awarding regular users via Foursquare and it’s no surprise the idea is spreading to the UK.

• First of all, you need to sign up
• Then, pick your team. You have a choice of 10 drivers across 5 different cities. You need to pick 2 for your team.
• When the race starts, Vodafone track the taxi drivers – using the GPS in their HTC Magic phones. The miles are totalled up. The idea is to complete the race distance in the shortest time. The race distance is that of the target F1 Grand Prix, it was the British one last week, next it’s the German one. Over 5 races, you score points for distance and time, so the person with the highest points wins a trip to the Italian Grand Prix (there’s lots of other prizes too)
• Keep an eye on your drivers. You get lots of statistics about them, so if your driver is not travelling enough, you can swap them around to improve your mileage.
• Come back again and again!

Vodafone Taxi Grand Prix (screenshot from site)

This is a pretty nigty idea. A contest connected with the real world and real people. You get brief bios of the drivers, who are also twittering, so you see what they are getting up to, so over time, you’ll get to know the drivers and what they are like. The mechanic is simple and the interaction allowed keeps you coming back

Spot the Bull with Orange (image from Poke)

Orange are again doing their Spot the Bull competition, giving away tickets to Glastonbury if you can predict where a bull will be in a field at a certain time of day. I played this last year and it was good fun; it got launched yesterday, starting off with an email, I’m guessing to all of last year’s participants. Later on, I got a lot more information about the competition from Poke.

• They’re using a new bull this year, called Desmond, a 5 year-old Charolais Apparently last year’s bull was a little quiet, they’re hoping for more action this year.
• In another change, they’ve adjusted the tech they’re using. Instead of a complicated set up using GPS and satellites to follow the bull action, they’ve got people in the ground, posting the position every 5 minutes and getting great pictures using a mini-dv camera. In a further extension, they’re also tweeting throughout at spotthebull
• They’ve gone mobile this year; go to the same URL on your phone’s web browser and get a sweet mobile version of the site. You can play direct from your phone or SMS your chosen square. There’s also a html version
• Return visits are encouraged. Statistical information is being built up around where the bull will be over the day, plus the tweets will let you know what Desmond’s favourite places are. You can start to predict the bull’s behaviour. Another tip is to play at weekends, which were quieter last year so you have a higher chance.
• There’s an embeddable widget, which brings all the bull action to your blog or profile.

What I think

It’s a successful mechanic for a competition, that obviously worked well last year, enough for them to bring it back. What I’m most impressed about is how ‘solid’ the campaign is, with all the elements connected. There’s a html version, a very nice mobile version, a chance to connect with SMS, the sharable elements. They’ve connected all the dots from a digital perspective. My biggest issue is with the flash version, which is heavy, takes a while to load and slows down the browser. It’s very, very good, but just a little too much of it. All in all, I love this campaign/

As a blogger, they connected with me well, a polite first enquiry about writing about it, then a whole load of imformation that is just lovely. It was done by the Poke team, so thanks to Dylan for the info.

It says about the singalong event in Traflagar Square “lacks something of the spontaneous feel of its predecessor, probably because of the organised nature of the event”.

Personally, I think something of the opposite. The dance video was highly organised, highly choreographed. They knew exactly what the the performers would do, it was just the spectators who were an unknown. In this, part from the idea, everything was an unknown. You could predict what could happen, but you had no idea the numbers, or whether they would join in. Imagine if it had been a damp squid and about 3 people had turned up.

From the spectator point of view, it was far more spontaneous, a real flash mob, a surprise event. I’m guessing many people felt far closer to the brand than with the dance.

I do agree that from an outside, see it on the telly or the digital billboard it does not work as well, it is not as exciting, but it was far more in the moment than the dance.

I like this, it’s far more authentic than the dance ones, where they’ve hired a bunch of professionals to turn up and do the dance. This really was a flash mob, called together through teaser videos, some judicious seeding and word of mouth. Apparently 13,500 people turned up to sing-a-long. As demonstrated by the many videos on YouTube and images around, many of them had cameras and phones. I;ve seen a lot of buzz about this, so I think it worked for them, at least from a brand awareness side. Given the current company situation, I think they need it!

They’ve got the Facebook Group and the YouTube channel promoting their next event. Cue dramatic music and a call to action – be at Traflagar Square in London 30th April at 6pm to see what they have in mind.

Update: there’s seems to be some desire to flashmob the flashmob. I’ve suggested taking signs for other networks, others like Chris are suggesting something more

Update2: It happened and looking around it seemed to have been fun. T-Mobile brought along the singer Pink, performed karaoke with the crowd and the big screens . So the new T-Mobile advert with Pink, Trafalgar Square and ‘you’ will be shown on Saturday at 9.

Here’s another one from the phone division for their new I8910 HD phone, a camera trick. I’ll have to admit, if I hadn’t been in a discussion with someone recently about something very similar it would have taken me time to guess what the trick was. What do you think it is?

They’re going to release a ‘making of’ video in a few weeks, explaining it. Meantime, join in the conjecture about how they did this.

Next up is one for Playstation, where “2008 American League MVP, and MLB 09 The Show cover athlete, Dustin Pedroia debates with PlayStaiton (sic)whether he can hit the high-and-inside fastball.” I copied and pasted that as I actually have no idea what it means. It’s nice to see even ‘professionals’ can do typos, considering the ones I have on this blog!

That’s it for the week, pretty quiet overall.