Case Study
Celebrity Fame Academy in conjunction with BT agilemedia
Solution: Interactive Campaign High Volume Voting
BBC Show Comic Relief does Fame Academy was the first show of its type in Europe – and possibly the world – to rely on text-only voting to decide its winning personality as the BBC needed to keep its voice lines free for the public to ring in, in order to donate to the actual Red Nose Appeal happening on the same night.
Dialogue Communications worked alongside BT agilemedia, a BT venture specialising in premium rate voting solutions, and iTouch, a company with years of experience in providing such services to the media and telecoms world, to provide the voting system for the show.
Dialogue’s role was to work with all six UK operators to establish easy-to-use short codes for the text voting and to set the appropriate tariffs, a highly complicated process with programming of this type.
The text voting for the show was a great success with Dialogue’s platform achieving a voting throughput of 427 votes per second for sustained periods during the finals evening. Based on this level of votes, the platform demonstrated a capability to process nearly two million text votes per hour. Dialogue also implemented its Effective Voting Throughout (EVT), which enabled the broadcaster to track and measure the speed of the voting to help future planning for the production teams involved. Dialogue reported an incredible invalid vote of only 0.8% out of more than a million calls – which was good for the programme and good for the revenue streams of the operators involved.
David Crowley, BT agilemedia’s Marketing and Business Development Manager explains:
“We were delighted with the numbers of messages we delivered. It was much more than we anticipated in the early stages and I have no doubt that we have a market leading proposition – which gives credit to both ourselves and Dialogue."
“It was great working with Dialogue because with them we know we have a market leading product that is significantly going to help us increase our percentage of the text messaging share of participation media.”
“The Fame Academy project proved that Dialogue’s base technology allows them to provide a robust, secure service as part of the BT offering that has the scalability to be able to handle mass messaging requirements to support events like Comic Relief.”