Coca Cola combined a television commercial with a mobile app and instant win promotion in a recent campaign. The result—the app was downloaded 390,000 times and Coke saw its brand revitalized in this Chinese city.

One likely reason behind the campaign's success was the novel "Chok" app, which worked akin to a Wii in that it turned the mobile phone into a remote controller. [video]

Users would then swing the phone when the "Chok" commercial came on. Chok, as Bizcommunity explains, is a colloquial term used by Hong Kong residents for swing. Participants were then entered into an instant-win contest with prizes that included cars, sports apparel, credit card spend value, travel coupons and movie tickets.

What Coca Cola is doing is virtually collecting bottle caps, Julie Ask writes in a Forrester blog. "The audio signal from the commercial triggers the application and syncs the user's motion with the video. The accelerometer is used to assess the quality of the motion of the user's mobile phone—the device that is used to catch the bottle tops virtually."

Games Too

Such deployments have been used in mobile games and apps. Last year London-based mobile game developer 1337bit got the ball rolling, so to speak, with an iPhone game called Eggs Eggs Eggs. It is a riff on a game played in Eastern Europe called egg tapping or egg jousting where people tap decorated hard boiled egg against the eggs of other players. In the iPhone version, a player would choose a virtual egg and "swing" it via the iPhone's accelerometer.

The Case for E-Commerce

There are other possible deployments for this mix of technology besides games and marketing, Forrester’s Ask points out in her post: "What if it could be applied to putting items seen on TV into a virtual shopping cart and then taken directly into a purchase path on the phone?"

"For higher consideration items like insurance, mortgages, and cars, what if they could raise their hand for more information or a quote?"