Wild Bean Café, an independent brand within selected BP service stations offers a large range of hot drinks with hot and cold food. There are 172 Wild Bean Cafés concentrated in London and South East, Midlands and Central Scotland. For many UK drivers, "food-on-the-move" conjures up images of roadside caravans serving up weak tea and bacon sandwiches of dubious provenance, very different from the fresh-ground coffee and tempting snacks at Wild Bean Café that BP wanted to encourage their target market to try.

"Overcoming negative perceptions is a big ask, so finding an innovative way to connect with our core target to stimulate consideration and trial using the mobile as the key medium seemed a high potential option," said Richard Smuts, Advertising and Communications Manager for BP Retail in Europe. i-movo was fast to implement across the entire BP Retail estate as it uses existing payment terminals. This meant it was very easy to train counter staff to use it as the voucher redemption process is very similar to processing a mobile phone top-up or congestion charge payment.

The chosen method was to offer drivers a free, large coffee by SMS coupon. i-movo's digital voucher technology was chosen as it is simple to implement in the stores and vouchers made available to anyone with even the most basic mobile phone. Critical to BP is that i-movo validates each voucher in real time and each voucher can only be redeemed a preset number of times (once in this case) so fraud and 'viral' spread by people forwarding copies of the voucher was avoided.

i-movo can provide up-to-the-minute information on which vouchers had been used, where, and by whom so BP decided to make good use of this capability to test the effectiveness of each of the multiple online and offline advertising channels. By the end of the activities lasting 38 days, contact had been made with over 55,000 consumers using nine campaigns. The rate of people using their vouchers to enjoy a free coffee ranged from 5.8% to 13.7%.

"Our core target overindexes in the use of online and mobile phones. These present a powerful new and innovative way to connect with them and make them feel like important customers. In addition, the real-time nature of the system is really attractive because we get to know exactly which customers have redeemed their vouchers, where and when. As the system is secure, the voucher can be used only once so we can reward our customers with really attractive offers without the financial exposure that can be a huge risk with digital vouchers" Richard Smuts - BP