Latitude Festival Case Study

Meeting the Business Need

Festival Republic, the promoter of Latitude, wanted to offer sponsor EE innovative ways of enhancing the brand’s profile. Breaking down the barriers between the physical festival and the digital space of the official festival app, Festival Republic also wanted to enhance attendees’ experiences with timely, high impact, push notification messages which could be branded by EE. Festival Republic recognised that push notifications can enhance the customer experience, but only if the messages are relevant and valuable. Such messages are more likely to guide discovery, enhancing the physical experience of the event. Consequently, there was a requirement for in-app messages to be tightly targeted to audience segments on a geo-behavioural basis – for example, recommending certain artists the recipient might like to see, activities nearby and providing interesting information about the festival site itself. The brief required this to be done in a cost-effective way avoiding a site-wide deployment of hardware infrastructure (such as beacons). Festival Republic also wanted the ability both to carefully control the number of messages sent to attendees and to measure the effectiveness of the messaging, to feed back to the sponsor.

The Solution

Crowd Connected’s multi-patented Colocator software provides real-time customer insight based on users’ locations and their activity history. Crucially, in an outdoor environment such as a music festival, without requiring the aggravation of widespread hardware installation/configuration. The Colocator SDK was integrated into the official Latitude Festival app (supplied by Greencopper). The home screen of the app asked users to opt in to location services and push notifications. This enabled ‘always on’ location tracking, delivering a stream of positioning updates which could then be processed and utilised in real time to target specific audience segments. As a result messages could be curated and targeted with highly contextualised recommendations based on the recipient’s interactions around the festival, including for example which artists they had been watching. Messages were sent to festivalgoers’ mobile phones via Greencopper push notification system.

• Trigger-based geo-fenced communications that combine both time and location (i.e. activity history), not just proximity – but with none of the limitations of beacon-based services.
• Increased flexibility, with no requirement to pre-define regions, either geo-fence or limited by fixed beacon positions.
• Full location data captured all the time, enabling regions / times / segments to be defined retrospectively.
• Sophisticated segment builder: for people who aren’t in an area, or have never been to an area. Geo-regions can be any shape and size, not just proximity based.
• Unrivalled in-depth post-event evaluation of messaging effectiveness, because Colocator accurately harvests and stores fine-grained trajectory histories of recipients both before and after a message is delivered. For any message that suggests an action, track whether the recipient acted on this suggestion.

Results

Latitude’s innovative use of Crowd Connected’s technology demonstrated conclusively the key to optimising in-app messaging is geo-behavioural targeting. At the simplest level artist recommendation messages for late night acts were sent only to people on site, not those who had already gone home, or who were back in the campsite. Using more complex audience segmentation techniques enabled messages to be very tightly targeted. Crowd Connected also demonstrated at Latitude the power of measurement, using a proprietary R4 score methodology (which for each message measures Reach, Relevance, Reaction and Result). This enables marketers to adjust and adapt their engagement strategy to improve relevance and value of messaging. It also provides multiple stakeholders with quantifiable metrics for each in-app message.

• The best targeted messages showed an uplift of 7x, i.e. those people who were recommended a certain artist were 7 times more likely to attend that artist.
• For those messages, 20-25% of message recipients went to see that artist as a direct result of receiving the message.
• For the best targeted message 28% of message recipients did actually see the act, and therefore will have found the message relevant.
• Contrast that with 0.1% for the least targeted message, validating just how important targeting is to providing relevant communication.