News

"Would you like to see my Bluetooth advert, little boy?"

 Either, people really do watch TV for the adverts... or else Bluetooth advertising is still enough of a novelty to make people behave strangely. At the Olympics, apparently, nearly a million sports fans actually agreed to download a Coca-Cola advert into their phones.

The promotion was reported by Amy Syracuse, a reporter for B2B, who described this as "the first mobile marketing campaign in Olympic history to leverage the wireless technology."

She reports:

Working with Pioco, Coca-Cola wired some 1,500 hot spots in Beijing and Shanghai. Concentrated around Olympic stadiums, transportation hubs, commercial areas, hotels, restaurants and other leisure venues, the hot spots were marked by signage bearing the Bluetooth symbol.

When users of Bluetooth-enabled devices entered a hot spot, they received a message inviting them to download an Olympic-themed Coke commercial. If the user clicked “yes,” the commercial downloaded to the device within 20 seconds.

Normally, Pioco recommends offering the viewer some incentive for downloading the commercial, but apparently, on this occasion, 880,489 Bluetooth users downloaded it over the month of August, just for the fun of enjoying the commercial.