The Great Melbourne Footy Grab

The Australian Football League (AFL) and The City of Melbourne teamed up with Clemenger BBDO and Mobiddiction to create a digital treasure hunt to promote the 2021 AFL football season. There were 54 locations around The City Of Melbourne where people could scan a QR code with their phone and win instant prizes or go into the draw for major prizes.

Overview

In the leadup to the 2021 footy season in Melbourne, The City of Melbourne partnered with the Australian Football League (AFL) to host a treasure hunt to build excitement for the footy and get Melburnians up and about. The treasure hunt featured instant prizes, major prizes, and a grand prize of a brand-new Toyota.

Participants were encouraged to search the city for The Great Melbourne Footy Grab QR codes. They could win instantly, or unlock prizes from Coca-Cola, Zoos Victoria, Sherrin, Toyota and more.

There were 50 Great Melbourne Footy Grab banners to be found in the city, which were branded promotional decals in outdoor and indoor public places around the City Of Melbourne. Each one had a unique number and QR code. There were also 4 special “Golden Footy” locations, which were displays with more than just decals and which could unlock special prizes.

Participants would scan the QR code with their smartphone the same as with any other QR code. (This was over a year after the COVID-19 pandemic started, so use of phone cameras scanning QR Codes was very common, having been normalised by COVID checkin procedures). Scanning the code would take participants to the competition website which was designed from the ground up with phone use as its main focus. On the website they could register to play (or be signed into their account if already registered), submit each “find” as they scanned each QR code, see their statistics, view the map of all 50 Footy Grab code locations, and see the T&Cs and Privacy Policy and other administrative tasks.

With the Victorian Government / City Of Melbourne as the client, Mobiddiction partnered with Clemenger BBDO for this project. Clemenger handled all the prize partnerships, marketing, advertising, major and grand prize draws, as well as all the on-ground distribution and installation of the QR Code decals and Golden Footy displays. Mobiddiction handled the security and technical aspects of the location-aware mobile web app and the Rewards backend platform. This included the minor and instant prize redemption mechanisms, fraud detection/prevention, audit trails of prize awards and redemption, audit trails of admin logins and changes, user and activity logging, and exports of participants eligible for the major prize draws.

Prizes

Problem Statement

We need to provide the easiest possible way for people to play. No app download, and the simplest possible registration.

Fraud detection and prevention would be needed to ensure fairness of entries in draws and compliance with the Terms & Conditions.

To award the major prizes and grand prize, identifying details of entrants would need to be stored. These details would count as Personally Identifying Information under the Privacy Act, and so security of its storage and processes and procedures in place about its handling would need to meet Victorian and Australian government cyber security policies and industry best practice.

The program needed to ensure compliance with state promotions/giveaway rules (including the “random chance” element that required compliance with Lottery regulations under the Gambling Regulation Act), the promoters own rules (City Of Melbourne & Victorian State Government), and the AFL’s rules for co branded promotions.

All prize giveaways, redemptions, and draws needed to be fully auditable to ensure fairness and security.

Our Thinking

The treasure hunt and prize mechanics were built on Mobiconnect, the platform that has since become M4, using a rewards module that we configured for this promotion.

Modern phones and mobile web development capabilities allow us to develop this as a mobile web app using both camera and location/GPS access, removing any need to download an app which greatly reduces friction in the user acquisition funnel.

With COVID-19 public health regulations having made scanning QR Codes with phone cameras, and visiting specific websites encoded into the QR Code a common and normal thing to do, using QR Codes as the primary source of confirmation of a user having visited and found the treasure hunt targets was an easy choice. Using custom designed and printed QR Code banners for each of the 50 locations

With some of the prizes being of high value (the new Toyota, for example), some care needed to be taken to detect cheating or fraudulent use of the webapp. We could use a combination of known locations of the QR Codes, timestamps of scans and web app visits, phone geo location data, and opening hours of indoor locations. We could also put in place processes for regular or emergency updates to the QR Codes and their tracking parameters (in case of in-progress detection of fraudulent entries).

Design

Clemenger BBDO as the agency partner for the City of Melbourne had come up with the design overview and supplied us with assets, brand guidance and direction. The Clemenger and Mobiddiction teams collaborated to ensure that our rewards and loyalty platform integration worked reliably for end users on their various devices.

Fully detailed designs, interactivity, and animation and motion design were done by Mobiddiction designers and frontend developers.

We had to give considerations to location, device types, and also ensure a smart but simple user experience that excited users to be part of this program.

As a Victorian Government project, we were required to meet relevant Web Accessibility Content Guidelines (WCAG). We tested against the W3C, Digital.NSW and Google WCAG recommendations. Finding QR codes in the real world and scanning them with a phone camera cannot meet every accessibility recommendation for blind users, and we documented those cases in the WCAG report.

Development

The web app used Mobiconnect as its database and backend, running on AWS. We configured and customised its rewards module to meet the project requirements.

The project had a pre-launch phase, an active phase, and a post promotion results display phase. These were activated based on the promotion start and end dates.

The web app used modern mobile first html and javascript, including mobile device specific integration with location services and cameras. The webapp was served via a customised WordPress site to allow for rapid and auditable updates. All the instant prize redemption and rewards mechanisms were provided via APIs from Mobiconnect, and all the users eligible for high value prizes were securely exported and random selection of major prize winners was conducted by Clemenger BBDO under appropriate procedures complying with Victorian Lottery regulations and the Gambling Regulation Act.

We use modern DevOps practices, with source control and code reviews, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to compile staging and auditable production builds, and we have app monitoring and alerting to allow rapid response to performance or other issues.

Ongoing

Mobiddiction hosted and managed the WordPress site, the webapp, and Mobiconnect Rewards platform on its high availability architecture on AWS cloud hosting services.

Mobiddiction provided on-call weekend and extended hours support during the promotion period, and office hours support outside the promotion period (as per the agreed support contract).

Daily and weekly activity reports were provided during the promotion, and a full report of all activity and usage was provided after the promotion was over.