Nov '07 - Púca helps Volkswagen get into Olympic spirit
With the Beijing Olympics less than a year away, Púca China is helping various local businesses gear up for the biggest sporting event on the planet. These include Volkswagen subsidiary FAW-VW, for which Púca has developed a multimedia communications campaign to market a pre-Olympics roadshow.
The roadshow, packaged as a theme park, on the one hand tells the story of the Olympics and its various sporting events and, on the other, showcases FAW-VW's latest models. There are a total of 12 rides/attractions based on the various sports themes.
There are five cities on the roadshow, which kicked off on 9 October in Cheng Chun. The second stop on the tour, Shanghai, is scheduled for the end of November. Each stop lasts for roughly a week and the whole roadshow series will end in spring 2008.The size of the event differs from city to city, with an average targeted number of visitors per day standing at around 20,000. So, for five cities and with each stop spanning a week, the total attendance is expected to reach at least 700,000.
Púca, working with FAW-VW and a China Mobile-affiliated company, picked key strategic points, such as upmarket hotels, high-end office buildings and shopping malls around the city, and broadcast an invitation to the car show via SMS to a target group of auto enthusiasts (those who had been selected for auto mobile campaigns before).
As well as manage the SMS element, Púca also provided a number of interactive kiosks within the theme park itself. These were managed by Púca - from design and installation to the daily running of the machines - on behalf of VW. Using the kiosks, theme park visitors could get information about the Olympic Games; download videos, games and ringtones to their mobile phones; and take photographs. The benefit of the kiosk from FAW-VW's perspective is that it allows visitors to book test drives and view a map of dealer locations.
Although Cheng Chun is a relatively small city, more than 18,000 kiosk user sessions were tracked during the week.
To add to the fun, Púca also installed a number of Bluetooth servers around the theme park which allowed visitors with Bluetooth-enabled mobiles to download various Olympics-based computer games.
This is not the first project Púca has managed for VW. Previous projects include deploying Bluetooth for the very first time in China during the largest car show in China, the Beijing Auto Show; installing a Bluetooth communications server in VW's flagship showroom in Beijing; and provide local-area SMS and kiosk support to FAW-VW's Cheng Du Auto Show.