July 21, 2010

ADIDAS, INDIA & THE WORLD CUP

By Romulo “Je” Alipio and Manish Mishra


This week we'd like to share with you an interesting story about adidas, which launched a hugely successful
mobile application in India during the World Cup and used the BuzzCity Advertising Network to promote it.

Now, you don't normally associate football with India, but during the World Cup a lot of us were just as crazy about the game as fans elsewhere.

Adidas made it easy for Indian users to follow the action.

And the combined reach of the Djuzz platform and the BuzzCity ad network ensured that adidas' targeted audience knew all about the application.

"THE QUEST"
Adidas'application - called the “The Quest” -- provided tournament fixtures, scores and standings as well as wallpapers featuring football stars and information about adidas football gear.

And if you wanted to change your support to a new team, maybe because your last team was already eliminated, adidas made it easy to update your wallpaper accordingly.

Just one week after being published, The Quest made its way onto the Djuzz Top Ten list for weekly downloads and the application quickly jumped to #57 on the list of Djuzz' Top 100 Games for the past six months.

Near the end of the World Cup, The Quest experienced 23,600 downloads in one day. To put that in context, a successful application on Djuzz normally peaks at 10-15k downloads.

Overall, during the 17 days that adidas' World Cup app was hosted on Djuzz, it experienced:

  • 187,000 unique visitors
  • 57,881 total downloads
  • more than 3400 downloads per day.
There are several reasons that this application was successful. It offered exclusive content, in partnership with FIFA. It was linked to a popular brand, adidas. And it was free. Of course, the application also worked well and was interesting!

LESSONS FOR DEVELOPERS
The Quest's success coincides with a large uptick in interest for other football apps as well. We tracked six such games -- 2008 World Soccer (YouPark), Footballz (HOVR), Euro Football (HOVR), Footballz 2009 (inLogic), Footballz Africa Edition (Thumbstar), and Adidas World Cup 2010 (Fugu Mobile) – and observed a 700% spike in visitors from May to June.


The average conversion rate, in terms of downloads per user, for these games also rose from 72% before the World Cup started to 97% during the tourney. (So just about everyone who visited the page during the World Cup downloaded the app!)

The popularity of these football games confirms a trend that we first noticed back in February when romance applications were popular. Consumer and gamer interest is linked to seasonal happenings, be it Valentine's Day or sporting competitions.

INCREDIBLE INDIA - THE MARKET CONTEXT
adidas ran The Quest campaign at a time when Indian mobile use is booming. The country is currently the second largest market in the BuzzCity network. In June, there were nearly 928 million pageviews, up 84% from just two months earlier.

The typical Indian mobile surfer is young (aged 20 – 24), male (88%) and enjoys mobile content sites (hence wallpapers, as in the adidas campaign are popular.) Users are spread throughout the country; no one city dominates the market. Advertisers can learn more on the BuzzCity Campaign Planner.

GOAL! - LESSONS FOR ADVERTISERS
Back to adidas, it's the first major brand to combine a campaign on Djuzz and the BuzzCity Advertising Network. On the banner side, the campaign delivered 26 million impressions and a click-through rate of 0.63%.

These are good numbers. But if we take a look at the app's total downloads, we see that 37% resulted from banner ad click-throughs. The balance – nearly two-thirds – were delivered by Djuzz' organic traffic. So, from an advertiser's perspective, Djuzz played a key role in the campaign.

Djuzz also provides clients with additional analytics, including hourly reports on the yield (i.e. number of downloads per pages viewed) and the instances that lead to downloads.

We expect more brands to combine the power of these two platforms. In India, Puma has a great mobile cricket game. More generally, TV programmers should think of apps that link to their shows, travel companies can create apps with information about fares and packages and brokerages should be offering apps that help investors track their portfolios.


Je Alipio is BuzzCity's Executive Producer of Games. Manish Mishra is the India Country Manager & Executive Producer.