General Mills cereal brand Wheaties is activating an ongoing association with sports via a new mobile game that enables users to test their baseball IQ.

The Wheaties Baseball MVP Game appears in the PickPointz mobile application, which allows users to predict the outcome of live sporting events. When players make accurate predictions, they earn points that can be redeemed for rewards from brands such as Cabela?s, Macy?s, Best Buy and Starbucks.

?Sports fans are incredibly passionate consumers,? said Jordan Mauer, chief marketing officer of PickPointz, St. Paul, MN. ?There are more than 170 million sports fans in the U.S. - that?s 66 percent of all U.S. consumers consider themselves sports fans, and 30 percent of those fans use mobile to regularly interact with sports.

?Brands that are heavily advertising in the sports arena find that mobile is a great complement to their overall communications strategies,? he said. ?They can reach consumers on an incredibly frequent basis with campaigns that are really targeted to the desired sports fan.

?They can have really authentic and unique ways of engaging through apps that reach that audience.?

The final score
PickPointz players can select from any of the live events that are going on in baseball on a given day. For each game, they can select a number of different play types: The final score, starting pitchers for both teams and Wheaties MVP game.

With the MVP game, players are trying to predict, based on a custom scoring algorithm, how a particular player is going to do in a live game.

Players can change their predictions as many times as they want up until the last second of the game. Earlier correct predictions earn more points.

The Wheaties Baseball MVP game launched in July and will continue for 13 weeks. Any player who makes picks in the game during this period will receive a free six-month digital subscription to Stadium Journey and a $20 ScoreBig e-gift code good on the first order of $50 or more.

The MVP players who earn the most points during this period will have a chance to win prizes such as a $250 ScoreBig gift card for game tickets or $150 hotel voucher for one night.

The top two players who earn the most points during each month of the contest will also win prizes. Each week, winners will be picked at random for several prizes.

Multi-screen engagement
Some of the other brands that PickPointz has worked with in the past 18 months include Miller Coors, Bacardi, McDonald?s, US Bank and Wells Fargo.

A survey conducted by PickPointz found that 59 percent of players watch more sports than they did before playing PickPointz, 78 percent watch longer and 79 percent watch sports or sports teams that they would not have watched otherwise.

?For brands that are engaged in talking to sports-minded consumers, what they find is if they are already talking to that audience, they can get really effective campaigns across the multi-screen environment,? Mr. Mauer said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York