Starbucks Summer's Perfect Storm

Julie Ask | July 20, 2006, 12:01 PM

Starbucks is running a mobile marketing program this summer. (I think that I first read about it in Moco or Fierce to be fair, but I can't find the link to their story right now.)Anyway. Here is the link for the information on the contest.

I love the campaign. Components include:

(for me the consumer)
- Short code to sign up (easy) - text "Summer" to 66268
- Trivia questions delivered via SMS - it amuses me
- I won a $5 gift card (ok, real value here) on my first right answer
- Won a drink coupon 5 correct answers later
- Entry into bigger sweepstakes

(for Starbuck's)
- Online registration
- Online opt-in for future promotions
- Trivia questions/answers tied into their products
- (will eventually drive foot traffic)

(for the carriers)

- if someone plays the entire contest, they will receive 57 SMS messages AND there is full disclosure on the web site so the player knows up front (at first I was horrified by the number of messages that I would be sending, but then I received the $5 gift card and the coupon for a free drink and I thought ... ok, at 10 cents per message, I'm already even)

- one can also submit answers via MMS (photos) - I haven't trialed this yet, but plan to so stay tuned. At 30 to 50 cents per message (answer), this could generate a lot of revenue

What I haven't seen/what is missing:

- Wouldn't know it existed if it weren't for the press
- Coupons are being mailed to me rather than having in-store redemption right away

I'm sure they thought of these things and there are reasons why they didn't do them, but still. So not exactly the perfect campaign, but it seems really close so far. Stay tuned for how the MMS version works with submitting photos of answers. I can only imagine that these are verified manually. We'll see.