Kia is a challenger brand in Australia, selling 30,000 cars out of one million. A longstanding major sponsorship partner of the Australian Open, Kia wanted to find a way to rejuvenate its brand consideration levels with the TV audience of Australia’s biggest sporting event.
Sixty-nine percent of Australians use one or more additional screens while watching TV, meaning audiences are paying less attention to traditional advertising. Ansible team came up with the idea to turn viewers’ smartphones into virtual tennis racquets by developing a second screen app that would interact in perfect sync with a series of 30s TV spots.
The solution was a world first mobile app called “Game On” that leveraged Shazam’s audio sync technology, an accelerometer used in fitness apps, and the smartphone’s gyroscope to simulate the experience of returning a serve against a professional tennis player. The accelerometer and gyroscope measured the quality of the swing, and the app would display whether or not the return was successful. Using the app people could play against TV, computer, tablet, on the tennis ground and at shopping malls.
During the 2014 Australian Open, the app was downloaded by more than 193,000 users in the first two weeks of its launch and quickly became the #1 app in the iTunes and Google Play Store charts. On average, players spent 15 minutes each using the app, viewing an average of 20 KIA commercials.
The app helped increase Kia’s brand awareness by 79% and the brand experienced an 8 percent increase in sales. Even after the tennis Open had finished, people from over 100 countries continued to play the game via the KIA Game On YouTube Channel.
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