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The Lost Phone Experiment

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the rundown

What happens to a lost phone? To find out, we "lost" 100 phones throughout the Netherlands. Our site tracks them and gives you live feedback of what happens to a lost phone. What is the best place to lose it, who is the person the most likely to get contacted?

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The Building Blocks

Vodafone introduced Mobile Protect, an app that allows smartphones users to track their phone in case it is lost, or wipe data from a distance. The challenge was to make people aware that they actually need such an app. How? Vodafone supplied us with 100 Android phones and we developed a custom app that was installed on each phone that measured the phone's location, movement, and whether it was being used to make phone calls, or simply to browse the web. This way we were able to aggregate data from all the phones and show the country what happened to your mobile in the hours after it’s lost.

The Votes

The Details

Agency
Brand
Vodaphone
Targeted Regions
  • Europe
Marketing Objective
Launch Date
Nov. 15, 2012

The Team

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The Stats

  • 4 total cups of coffee drunk
  • 62 total hours of missed sleep
  • 14 team members working on this project

The Results

Instead of pushing the product, we chose to raise awareness for the problem of losing a phone and all its data by showing people what actually happened to a phone that was lost. We didn't know what the outcome would be, so it was a pretty exciting campaign.

The data was being updated in real-time and visitors could browse back in time to see where the phones were dropped, where they got picked up and in the end where they were returned.

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