This year’s annual Wimbledon tennis championships will have a dedicated mobile application that will enable attendees to track their favorite players and stay abreast of all the happenings via streaming video and radio.
Users will be able to track up to ten tennis players and receive push notifications on their progress throughout the tournament. Additionally, the app features an interactive map enabling users to find restrooms, restaurants and other amenities.
“They are trying to create a way to deeply engage tennis enthusiasts - those who are attending the events at Wimbledon as well as those who are not,” said Coleen Carey, vice president of product marketing at Urban Airship, Portland.
“They’ve created a really great experience that is compelling from a content perspective with a lot of video and radio, and this is the one-stop shop via the mobile device for everything you want to know about the Wimbledon games as well as deeply personalizing that by allowing an individual to go in and track their favorite players,” she said.
“It is really taking all of the benefits of mobile and the fact that not only is this a major worldwide event but a local event for those who attend and creating all points of information via that app.”
Urban Airship is providing the push notifications for the Championships Wimbledon 2013 app, which was built in partnership with the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club and IBM.
Real-time updates
The Wimbledon Championships take place June 24 - July 5.Custom mobile apps designed specifically for live events are becoming more common as mobile adoption grows and organizers discover that mobile can drive deep engagement with attendees, who are away from home and their desktop computers but still want to be connected to information about an event.
For big events such as Wimbledon, push messaging can be used to remind users when a specific performance or match begins or inform users when there has been a change in the schedule.
Push messaging has also been used at several events in the past year to inform attendees in real-time when a dangerous thunderstorm was forecasted, for example.
Inherently mobile
Events such as Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, South by Southwest and last year’s London Olympics have all offered custom mobile apps that included push messaging with good results.For example, the Lollapalooza app saw an opt-in rate for push messaging of around 90 percent. Additionally, users opened the app on average 15 times per day.
“Events are inherently mobile and they are inherently location centric,” Ms. Carey said. “Mobile provides an ability to reach attendees at events in ways that we have never been able to do before.
“Because events are mobile in nature and facilitated around a location, you get the real-time nature of the device, you get the value,” she said. “We have found that for users at an event, the event itself is very important to them so the response rates and the value of that have become really apparent.”
