ABOUT

An innovative audio / map tour that coined the industry generic term 'Travelcast'.

No brief but some gritty problems: Amex Cards being 'supressed' in favour of the competition; smaller retailers (merchants) complaining of the low foot-fall through their doors of high net-worth individuals; the desire to stimilate the general spend of Cardmembers.

The idea came to me, univited eureka style, one Saturday morning: create a cultural walking tour, a 'museum in the street', that would appeal to 'culture vulture' Amex Cardholders. It would be something interesting to do on weekend city breaks or longer holidays and be a vehicle to take Cardmembers and prospects to lesser-trod areas of towns and cities. Wandering in the city, one often finds shopping and eatery gems down backstreets, so why not get a deal on the way if you're an Amex Cardmember. If you're not a Cardmember, maybe it would be a prompt them to become one.

We pitched the idea (the mock-ups I prepared are in the last frame) and not only did we get budget to do a pilot, we got the perfect forum. The plan was to use Turin winter Olympics - of which Amex weren't sponsors - and target game-goers with a Guerilla marketing campaign created by a small 'hit team'.

A bit of research later I found that since the Romans founded the city it had been a place of occult and religious activity (I had wanted to do food, but that was just my childhood love of Nutella, invented in Turin). We had our theme for the audio guide which became 'Mystery & Mysticism in Turin'. Scriptwriting done, I had the pleasure of walking the tour with a rough cut of the audio and map, just to make sure all was in sync, in the winter sunshine of Turin.

We enjoyed 3000 downloads in the first week of launch, mainly through natural search and promotion on Amex dot com. Amex managed to secure loads of Selects deals in the city already but Merchants clamouring to be included in the next release.

I created a factory system to assess ideas for locations (.e.g. one could have an interesting place with no decent shopping so that would have no commerical benefit) and then steer work through production into a successful release, the next release being a tour in Amsterdam.