Absolut

Background
Absolut Vodka has a long and proud history of innovative and award winning campaigns in print and more recently digital marketing. It was a therefore a given that Absolut would deliver a mobile campaign but only when it would be possible to do something that truly lived up to the brand perception.

Solution
In December 2007 after 5 months of research, design, consumer testing and extensive device testing Absolut launched the first drink application ever by a major spirits brand. The service is easily understood by everybody and based on the successful absolutdrinks.com website. The mobile application, available to download for free and initially launched in the US, includes 1000+ drink recipes, top lists of the most popular vodka-based drinks, random drinks and a home bar search function, making it possible to check what the user has at home and generate a list of inspiring drinks that can be blended from the available ingredients.

The mobile service is based on the Java technology. Once downloaded, the application can be used as much and as many times the user wants, without connecting to the mobile Internet. Flash lite technology and WAP was considered alternatives, but ruled out due to the fact that they would not be able to deliver a user experience of a high enough quality to be associated with the Absolut brand.

Absolut Drinks works on more than 90% of the active java enabled devices in the US or about 70% of the total active US cellular phone base. In addition to this a basic wap site with the top drinks was offered to ensure that the other 30% of customers would not miss out completely.

Result:
Initially the target audience was limited to Access club members and therefore with a limited distribution budget but later the audience was extended to all potential customers. The budget was still less than 2.5% of the overall digital media spend in 2007.

The application can be downloaded at mobile.absolut.com on the mobile or www.absolutdrinks.com on the web.

Within 3 months after launch the mobile service had over 20.000 visits to the mobile web site, 10.000 downloads of the application and over 35000 exposures* of the Absolut drinks guide.

The number of downloads vastly exceeded the target among Absolut Access users. In addition to this the download success rate from m.absolut.com was 74%, exceeding all our hopes for the US market considering the high proportion of low-end devices and several carriers only supporting Brew in a closed garden environment. As a bonus 19% of the visitors to m.absolut.com have also downloaded extra content such as ringtones, wallpapers and bar mixing videos.