Case Studies
Big Brother in conjunction with BT agilemedia
Solution: Interactive Mobile Campaign High volume voting
In the world of reality TV, Dialogue Communications has been setting new standards. Working in association with BT agilemedia during Big Brother 6 on Channel 4, the massive level of sustained text throughput per hour is thought to have broken all previous records for text voting throughput in the UK.
The success of the viewer interaction was hugely dependent upon technical solutions, which were provided by Dialogue and BT agilemedia, that were capable of supporting enormous surges of voting - from people located far and wide.
The technical solutions behind the text-message voting campaign were composed of two major elements, accepting SMS votes and puts them into buckets, according to the person who has been voted for, and counting them, and secondly a dashboard system that the TV studio staff could look at over the Internet. In addition, from the dashboard, studio staff also controlled exactly when the vote was open or closed.
Dialogue used their Mobile Applications Portal (MAP), which is an online service designed for a wide range of organisations, from local government to corporate giants, who want to use mobile messaging as a channel to their customers.
Mike Steel at BT agilemedia explains:
"We supply and support a range of services and products to iTouch, the Service Provider that was used by the broadcaster, Channel 4. As a key supplier to iTouch, BT agilemedia was asked to supply the technology behind both the voice and SMS voting services, plus modification of the basic service to support the specific voting format for BB6. This included support of the event, particularly on Friday nights when the evictions took place. We also provided post-vote reporting on volumes, billing success and network breakdown among other things."
“Since August 2004, Dialogue has been our prime supplier of mobile messaging and application services and they were the obvious choice to provide our high-volume SMS voting service. They created the service from our brief, managed the relationships with the mobile operators and provided support during the event.”
Dialogue’s MD Paul Griffiths explains:
“Overall, the service was a success in the eyes of our customer, iTouch, and their customer, C4. This was due to a lot of work by all parties and a focus on providing the best service possible, given the small lead times. For Big Brother 6 we had an extremely high capacity of votes to process over 12 weeks, which came in very concentrated periods such as show times and following Davina McCall’s call-to-action but our technology handled them with great success.”