BP "Thirst For Music"

Using mobile technology to create 224 prize draws, in real time.

Cars and trucks run on petrol, diesel and LPG. People run on coffee, energy drinks, soft drinks, mineral water, fruit juice. Fuel and drink - BP New Zealand sell both.

To boost the sales of their drinks in August and September 2007 they called on First Star Communications, who then chose Run The Red to handle the mobile technology.

The idea was 'Thirst For Music'. Each time a customer bought a drink, any drink, from 176 participating BP stores they had the chance to go in the draw to win an iPod Shuffle.

There was a new winner drawn every 3 hours for 4 whole weeks. A total of 224 draws, day and night

'Thirst For Music' wasn't about a draw that was held once every six months. Or every six weeks. Or every six days. Or even once a day. This was about having a draw every three hours, for three weeks. And customers could enter any time day or night.

To add an extra challenge BP also wanted the promotion to run in conjunction with other in-store promos, like 'buy 2 V Energy Drinks for $4'.

Here's how we cracked it.

Each time a customer bought drink they'd get a unique code. This meant that we had to generate a total of 2 million codes. Customers were invited to text in their code to BP's shortcode 2255.

We developed a system that would generate a 'random winning time' somewhere within each 3 hour time slot. The very first valid entry received after that randomly chosen time won.

For example, if the time slot was 12 noon till 3pm, then the system might randomly pick '1:15:23s' as the winning point. The very next text received was the winner.

'Thirst For Music' was getting an incredible 12,000 entries a day so it was only a matter of milliseconds before each prize got scooped up.

The system had to be robust enough to handle extraordinarily high numbers of entries. And automatically text back the lucky winners. This had to happen over and over and over and over again.

'Thirst for Music' was easily one of the most successful promotions BP had ever run. 142,000 people entered, and together they generated over 380,000 texts. Clearly, BP customers lapped it up.