Primarily aimed at the 'youth' market, RPS027 was part of a well-defined strategy to make Telecom's 027 users feel vindicated for sticking with them by providing a fun game where cool prizes could be won, but most importantly to make Vodafone users feel excluded. RPS027 was a fully integrated event involving a text engine, website, wapsite, traditional advertising and even TV programming content.

This game event demonstrated how moving from the traditional advertising model of marketing interruption, to one of market experience and engagement can pay dividends.

The event was initially 'teased" with an online viral campaign for 8 days prior to the launch of the 'sign-up phase' for the tournament. This involved developing 3 totally irreverent weblogs by fictitious supporters of Rock, Paper or Scissors, then seeding various "youth related" site forums and chat rooms.

To add even more international credibility to the stature of this event, TOUCH/CAST also enlisted the endorsement of the World Rock Paper Scissor Society (yes, there really is a world society!) to RPS027, and Graham and Doug Walker the co-founders of the world society came down form Canada and Prague to officiate at the televised finals.

The website, www.rps027.co.nz, which was totally integrated to the text engine and WAPsite went through two main public phases.

The first of which was the launch / sign-up phase, where people could sign up to play in the tournament as well as fill in their profile details, and even build their own avatar to represent them on-screen.

The second phase involved closing down the registration function at the deadline for entry, but allowing players to add more details to their individual profiles as they played in the tournament. Just prior to TV finale, the site was again updated to show the country who the 8 finalists were, and finally, who the overall winner of RPS027 was.

The traditional media elements included radio and television advertising and five half-hour RPS challenge TV shows, where VJs from different genres played against each other to play the music videos of their choice, and a TV Finale.

Once down to 8 finalists, they fought each other in a one-hour televised finale show to decide who would be the last player standing, and the person to take on The Machine in the final confrontation and win some really cool prizes.

Results

The mobile telecommunications market is highly competitive, therefore some of the results are commercially sensitive, however Telecom Mobile were hoping for 30,000 registered players - and thought that might be a stretch!

Therefore, 85,000+ registered players and 2.1 million mobile originated txt messages surpassed their wildest dreams.

Although primarily aimed at the "youth" market (in this case 15 -25), with players aged between 10 years and well into their 50s, this tournament proved beyond doubt that 'youth' is not a demographic any more - youth is a psychographic, it's an attitude!

In conclusion the last word should go to Kevin Bowler, Telecom Mobile's Head of Marketing, " RPS027 was a massive success for Telecom Mobile. Not only in terms of the scale of the game and the fact that it has become the biggest txt game in New Zealand, but it was great fun for our loyal customers".