Showtime Unlocks Check-In Success

It’s not a new story, by any means: Budgets are low so creativity has to be high. And while it may sometimes seem like the tale of the small, local business, the budget/creativity crunch can even affect the big guys. Case in point when Showtime was looking for a wallet-friendly way to promote their new reality show following the World Series Champions, ‘The Franchise: A Season with the San Francisco Giants.’ The solution? Looking to location-based marketing star, Foursquare, to get smartphone-wielding fans to check-in to The MLB Fan Cave at Broadway and East 4^th Street in Manhattan, where a baseball dispenser would reward them with a branded MLB baseball, including some autographed by Hall of Famer Willie Mays.

“We started to think how we would promote the show because the budget was extremely limited,” said George Debolt, senior vice president of media promotions and partnerships at Showtime. Their agency, OMD, came forth with the concept of targeting the show’s likely target where they’d be – at The MLB Fan Cave – with a reward that would get them interested. Further, with approximately 25% of Foursquare check-ins being shared to Facebook and Twitter, this seemingly local promotion would have a viral element as one in four check-ins would then appear to an average 150 Facebook friends. But building a ball dispenser that works via smartphone application check-ins is no doubt expensive, affordable perhaps to Showtime and MLB but less so to the average business, right?

The real success story came in Showtime’s use of resources in hand – an MLB storefront as a billboard, and the little known free-to-use Foursquare API. An API, short for application programming interface, is geek speak for a piece of rules and code that bridges two technologies: In this case, the check-ins from Foursquare with the baseball dispenser for Showtime’s ‘The Franchise’. This bridge comes at no cost outside of any developers needed to complete that bridge, and was the secret sauce that allowed Showtime to deliver 3,000 baseballs to fans, thousands of impressions to their friends and followers, and hundreds of thousands of impressions through media coverage. Programming an action through Foursquare’s API, while free and readily available, has been rare according to Foursquare’s Director of Business Development, Jonathan Crowley.

A small budget, an existing storefront, a free piece of technology, and 3,000 baseballs to create hundreds of thousands of impressions for a new cable television show. And while it’s easy to pass this instance of location based marketing off as being the domain of a deep-pocketed television network, that would be ignoring the power location based marketing provides all businesses. Check-ins aren’t just for sharing your lunch anymore, and savvy businesses will look for ways to turn the 50%+ of smartphone owners into rewarded brand advocates without breaking the bank in the same way Showtime thought of a different use for an existing technology.