Texting wins over wine industry

By RICHARD PAMATATAU

Text messaging is working for the wine industry as a promotional tool, with Montana already toasting the success of its "win a trip to Queenstown" texting competition.

Montana kicked off a transtasman competition on May 1 that was open to all buyers of its Lindauer sparkling wine.

Customers entered to win one of two all expenses paid trips to the Queenstown Winter Festival by texting the last six digits in the barcode on the bottle they had bought.

Montana's group brand manager Kathryn Pettit said text messaging had better response over other competitions the company had run, where the customer had to send in a neck tag from the bottle.

"Those competitions offered minimal response - perhaps two to four per cent and the costs of running them were often quite high," she said.

The promotion, run by Auckland texting developer The Hyperfactory, had cost under $100,000, said Petitt and the returns to Montana had been very good.

Because the response with this promotion was immediate, people showed a willingness to participate, she said. Sending a text cost 50c.

Pettit would not say how many texts the company had received since the competition opened but acknowledged that it was one of the best promotions the company had run.

The eventual winners of the trips would be selected randomly by computer, she said, though prizes like scarves, cellular phones and Ipods were being given away daily.

The company did not see a place for this kind of competition with its more upmarket product brands.

Hyperfactory director Geoffrey Handley said the most difficult thing about the Australian end of the competition was organising competition licences.

His company has already worked on a number of transtasman texting initiatives, and expects smart organisations to embrace even more use of technology like this.