BiteMark has come up with some rather innovative additions to its Proximate brand of Bluetooth advertising and marketing solutions since we last met them in November last year.

The company recently conducted an innovative 20-day guerilla marketing campaign in different parts of the Klang Valley to sign up new customers for  CIMB Bank.

Called the CIMB Dream Drive Campaign, it had four promoters called Proxinomads, each with a backpack containing the company's Proxibeamer Bluetooth content transmitter and an LED screen on a pole sticking out of the bag and above their heads.

They travelled around to public places such as bus stops, sidewalks, shopping malls and so on to tell members of the public about CIMB Bank and to sign them up for an account, and they certainly attracted the public's attention.

That was not all, as the Proxinomads invited passers by to receive and play a Java game on their mobile phone from the Proxibeamer. Each player then reported their score to the Proxinomads and the top three scorers within a two hour period won RM50, RM30 and RM20 respectively. Many stayed back to play second and subsequent rounds during the following two-hour period.

There were nine winners each day or 180 altogether over the campaign period. Altogether, over 8,000 persons played the game.

For those who signed up for a CIMB Bank account, each stood a chance to win a Volkswagen Tuarag car for every RM500 they deposited in their account. “One person in Bukit Bintang deposited RM800,000 in the hope to win the car,” said BiteMark chief executive officer, Benjamin Fong Yen Keat.

“CIMB Bank found that traditional advertising methods such as newspaper adds did not attract enough attention and our guerilla-style of marketing where we hit and run at different places was more effective and we did not have to rent space in malls,” Fong added.

Free gifts

In another project, BiteMark placed a Bluetooth Lightbox containing a Proxibeamer in the customer service area of five of CIMB Bank's branches and the first 20 customers each day who turned on their phone's Bluetooth tranceiver received a voucher which they could redeem for a free gift.

Altogether, 2,258 phones with their Bluetooth tranceiver turned on were detected over the campaign's five days and among them, 567 or 25.1% accepted the voucher, 645 or 28.6% rejected them and 1,046 or 46.3% were unreachable – ie. had their Bluetooth turned on but for some reason their owners did not respond.

“Another application of this system is as part of a queue ticketing system in the customer service centres,” said Fong.

Here customers who get a queue number are invited to accept a Java applet on their phone via Bluetooth, into which they key in their queue number. The applet communicates with the queue management system via GPRS or 3G data and alerts to user when their number is close to being called, so that they can go shopping or attend to other business while waiting.

The system can also send customers a video via Bluetooth which they can watch on their phone while waiting.

Besides queue management, the system can be customised for use in nightspots, bars, airports and so on. BiteMark was in discussion with potential customers in the telcommunications, entertainment, movie distribution, games and food & beverage industries.

Media distribution

“We're also thinking of building a media distribution network based on Bluetooth nodes located in public places such as cafe's where we can distribute suitable content and advertisement to their cellular phones,” said Fong.

“We developed our patented Proximate Bluetooth marketing technology in 2006 and over the years it's been imitated by many others in Europe and North America,” said Fong. “Our Proxibeamer has seven antennas and can transmit to 112 devices simultaneously. We have implemented 41 systems so far, while our nearest competitor has implemented five,” he claimed.