ÉTUDE DE CAS

123play.com – Webit PR

Introduction

123play.com is the consumer facing website of Mobile Advertising Solutions Ltd (MAS). It’s the UK’s first ad-funded mobile games service, and launched in March 2008. The site hosts games from top publishers such as THQ Wireless, RealArcade, Digital Chocolate, Vivendi Games Mobile, Hands-On Mobile, PlayerX and IndiaGames. 123play.com incorporates adverts from brands such as Britvic, eBay, The Sun, IPC Media, O2, Unilever and Ladbrokes, with each advert viewable for a few seconds both before and after each gaming session.

Background

Following the successful launch of 123play.com within the UK market, MAS wanted to announce two significant pieces of news to a wider audience; firstly the expansion into the four key European markets of France, Germany, Italy and Spain, and secondly an affiliate deal with the well known UK publishing house, Dennis Publishing. Mi liberty wanted to ensure this news was easily accessible to as many media outlets as possible across these countries.

Objective

The objective was to highlight to the UK and European media the success of 123play.com in a short space of time – moving from an independent UK online gaming website, to a Europe-wide site in partnership with successful publishing house. From a coverage perspective, it was important to ensure 123play.com’s message was spread as far as possible across all five European markets as a means of capturing the attention of consumers, the trade media and also games publishers and brands who might want to work with MAS in those markets.

Our Approach

Mi liberty decided that the best approach for 123play.com was to use a press release distribution service that would not only allow visibility in the UK market, but outreach in Italy, Spain, France and Germany at a cost that was suitable to MAS’ PR budget. Beyond this, using online distribution meant that there was an opportunity to include plenty of images and multimedia assets which would showcase the benefits of the service, and allow the target audience to gain a good understanding of the look and feel of the 123play.com brand. Effectively, the PR would be pre-seeding 123play.com’s brand ahead of the launch of the consumer-facing websites.

We worked with MAS to build a social media release; this is a way of taking a traditional press release and reformatting it to take advantage of social bookmarking tools, as well as making the release blogger and online media friendly. Using this tool, Mi liberty could guarantee reaching not only traditional journalists, but previously untapped bloggers as well as popular online news and gaming sites, many of which were extremely hard to reach via other mediums. We crafted a release which captured the important points of the announcement, but which also included images, video and additional information relevant to the release. This was an extremely important element to the European campaign, as it was important for media and bloggers to visualise what the site looked like, and how the ad-funded gaming experience worked.

Results

Mi liberty gained a massive combined total of 86 pieces of coverage across the UK and the European markets, with hits in several top tier publications including; Mobile Entertainment, PocketGamer.co.uk, Total Telecom, Develop, MoCo News, Mobile Marketing Magazine and Telecom Paper. The amount of coverage produced was over four times the amount generated through the standard press release distribution, with visuals being used in a significant amount of websites and publications.

Much of this came from the previously untapped blogging sites, an area that was key for 123play.com. By being able to engage with bloggers not only in the UK but across Europe, 123play.com was able to reach its key audience like never before. Local media could access the release quickly and easily in their own language, and couple post news instantly without having to translate it individually. This also created a new contact base for 123play.com, and opened up many opportunities for them with local brands and advertisers.

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