British oil giant BP's Wild Bean Café has launched a mobile bar code voucher campaign across Britain.

Secure digital voucher systems provider i-movo is working with Wapple to create unique bar code vouchers that are delivered to mobile phones and can be redeemed at retail outlets. Brands such as the Evening Standard, the Financial Times, the Daily Mail and Vermont Chardonnay have also used i-movo's mobile digital voucher technology.

"It's quite a simple strategy -- over the last three years, we've led the market in secure digital vouchers, email, text messaging and contactless and magnetic stripe cards," said David Tymm CEO of i-movo, London. "The marketing possibilities are limited when you're only using text messages, with no color or graphics, and when voucher numbers need to be captured at the point of sale manually and key entered.

"The advantages of our platform is that we can include images and graphics to deliver a richer brand experience for consumers," he said. "Secondly, we can include a bar code that represents our voucher to make it easier for retailers to capture it.

"They want to make offers to their customers that represent real value, and as soon as you distribute anything of real value digitally, there's a viral risk of distribution -- we can track vouchers to control viral risk."

As an independent brand imbedded in BP Connect convenience stores, Wild Bean Café offers a large range of hot drinks, baguettes, panini and baked goods.

Six years after launch, there are 172 Wild Bean Cafés concentrated in London and South East, Midlands and Central Scotland.

The goal of the campaign was to reach British drivers and counteract the negative connotation surrounding "food-on-the-move" offerings.

The strategy was to connect with the Wild Bean Café's core target demographic and stimulate consideration and trial using mobile as the key medium.

The chosen method was to offer drivers a free, large coffee via SMS coupon.

I-movo's digital voucher technology was chosen as it is simple to implement in the stores and vouchers made available to anyone with even the most basic mobile phone.

I-movo can provide up-to-the-minute information on which vouchers had been used, where, and by whom so BP decided to make good use of this capability to test the effectiveness of each of the multiple online and offline advertising channels.

Critical to BP is that i-movo validates each voucher in real time and each voucher can only be redeemed a preset number of times -- once in this case -- so fraud and viral spread by people forwarding copies of the voucher was avoided.

I-movo was fast to implement across the entire BP Retail estate as it uses existing payment terminals.

This also meant it was very easy to train counter staff to use it as the voucher redemption process is very similar to processing a mobile phone top-up or congestion charge payments.

This was proved when all 2,500 terminals across Britian were updated overnight to accept i-movo vouchers.

Simultaneously, instructions for staff together with test voucher numbers were distributed across the Wild Bean Café network.

Subsequent up-to-theminute monitoring of the test campaigns showed a high degree of awareness and training by the sites.

For the first phase, to appeal to an audience made up mostly of drivers BP designed an online competition publicized on the aa.com, MultiMap, Map24 Via Michelin and others to win one of a number of satellite navigation systems from Tom-Tom.

Consumers could enter by answering a question on a Web banner ad, a microsite or by responding by text.

A separate campaign was run with national radio station Heart FM comprising program sponsorship and direct contact via email and SMS with Heart's VIP club.

In all cases, every entry was entered into the drawing to win the SatNav systems and every entry won an imovo voucher for a free cup of coffee at any Wild Bean Café in Britain.

In total, six discrete entry channels were available and using i-movo, BP could measure the response on each channel, at any time.

To control entry across all channels, BP engaged mobile marketing firm Enpocket and their Marketing Engine, known as EME, to restrict entry in line with terms and conditions decided by BP.

Each i-movo voucher contains a unique number and an expiry date and time, in this case seven days from the point of issue. The voucher is presented at any Wild Bean Café in Britain and the cashier keys the number into the payment terminal.

The voucher is validated in real-time and prints out a receipt with the promotion code for one free cup of coffee. The printed voucher is then retained in the till for reconciliation at the end of the shift.

As the campaign progressed, it was possible to see the relative success of each advertising channel both in terms of responses to the competition and vouchers redeemed together with details of time, date and which Wild Bean Café the customer received their coffee from.

After a few days, 78 percent of sites had processed at least one voucher.

The campaign received a massive boost when a satisfied customer had placed a link to the microsite on http://moneysavingexpert.com, a site run by journalist Martin Lewis to publicize consumer offers.

Mr. Lewis also mentioned the campaign on Wednesday morning's breakfast program on Radio 2 presented by veteran broadcaster, Terry Wogan.

The show regularly attracts in excess of 5 million listeners and Martin chose to mention the Wild Bean Café promotion in the course of the broadcast.

Shortly afterwards, many thousands of visitors entered the competition providing evidence that traditional, old media can be effective in influencing online behavior and response to new media such as mobile.

The second phase of the activity was a direct campaign to existing BP customers who collect Nectar points, the cross-retailer scheme run by Loyalty Management UK of which BP are a founder-member.

A series of campaigns, sent directly to Nectar collectors' phones inviting them to receive a voucher for a free coffee, was tested, sometimes with the additional incentive of additional Nectar points equal to a full tank of fuel or an average families weekly grocery shopping, to test response to varying levels of incentive.

By the end of the activities lasting 38 days, contact had been made with more than 55,000 consumers using nine campaigns.

The rate of people using their vouchers to enjoy a free coffee ranged from 5.8 percent to 13.7 percent.

Mobile is the way to go
Some 30,000 retailers across Britain have had to type in a unique code sent to the customer's phone via SMS, but now they can scan bar codes directly from a mobile device to fully automate the voucher redemption process.

It goes without saying that transactions, whether mobile or otherwise, have to be done with the highest level of security.

"When brands launch giveaways and mobile coupon promotions, those vouchers could've been circulated to anybody and anybody could've claimed those free products," Mr. Tymm said. "We allow them to make very compelling offers to consumers, but without risking financial exposure."

One of the main problems i-movo faced was making sure that the bar code vouchers could be displayed accurately on any mobile phone, with so many different variations of screen size, hardware and software.

In addition, clients had asked how brands could be better represented on mobile devices by displaying full color logos and photographs, for example.

A goal of i-movo was to develop an enhanced version of its Secure Digital Vouchers, but the company found that MMS and picture messages do not display consistently across handsets and do not work at all on devices like the iPhone and Blackberry.

If a bar code is in any way corrupted or distorted, it won't scan, according to i-movo.

The combination of WAPL and the Wapple Exhibit device profiling technology helped i-movo deliver its new Enhanced Secure Digital Vouchers.

This new service is available across the 21,000 PayPoint retailers in Britain.

With more than 100 new device and software combinations appearing every month, i-movo needs complete confidence that its vouchers are optimized for any existing mobile device and that new devices are supported as soon as they come on the market.

For this application, it is also critical that the bar codes scan reliably to provide a good experience for consumers and retailers.

The platform has been made possible using Wapple's new XML-based mark-up language, Wapple Application Programming Language -- WAPL -- which is designed to enable the rapid development and deployment of device-independent applications.

By using WAPL, the digital bar codes can be delivered to, optimized and displayed on more than 50,000 different mobile phones and devices using the mobile Internet.

This means that the mobile vouchers can be scanned at the point of sale to redeem goods, services or mobile ticketing, for example.

Established in 2004, Wapple has entered the mobile Internet market with its design and publishing platform, which helps clients create mobile Web sites.

Its dynamic profiler and delivery engine ensures that sites are automatically optimized for any mobile phone, PDA or games console.

I-movo was founded in 2003 with the aim of providing a digital voucher service that can be implemented by any retailer without the need for additional hardware or expensive custom software development.

Five years later, i-movo has launched a secure digital voucher system using existing payment technology deployed across multiple retailers and used daily by multiple brands.

"We absolutely have plans to expand to other markets," Mr. Tymm said. "Our method of validating our vouchers is with credit card payment messages, which is the de facto standard for retailers all over the world to accept payments, and we've patented this technology.

"Right now, it's compatible with 21,000 retailers in the UK, but over time it will be the majority," he said. "Laser bar code scanners don't work, so it will require food and drug retailers to have CCD scanners at the point of sale.

"Hand-held CCD scanners are the only ones that can scan mobile phone screens."