Title	POLITICO EU REFERENDUM TRACKER
Brand	POLITICO
Product/Service	EU REFERENDUM TRACKER
Category	A09. Innovative Technology
Entrant	DIGITASLBi London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation	DIGITASLBi London, UNITED KINGDOM
Additional Company	POLITICO Brussels, BELGIUM
Additional Company 2	URBAN AIRSHIP San Francisco, USA

Name	Company	Position
Rafe Blandford	DigitasLBi	Senior Mobile Strategist
Kate Day	POLITICO	Editorial Director
Ilicco Elia	DigitasLBi	Head of Mobile
David Linnard	DigitasLBi	Technologist
Steve Tan	Urban Airship	Relationship Management

The Campaign

The EU Referendum Tracker used an Apple Wallet pass to deliver content and notifications to iPhones. It was the first time Apple Wallet was used publicly for breaking news and dynamic content distribution. Users installed the pass in the Apple Wallet app (which is preinstalled on all iPhones) with just one click from a URL. Once a pass was installed, POLITICO could alert the user to important breaking news and dynamically update the pass with the latest developments. The front of the pass displayed polling results leading up to the June 23rd vote, and then switched to graphically display voting results as they came in from 382 voting districts. The back of the pass provided analysis, summaries and links to POLITICO’s up to the minute coverage, becoming an important source of traffic for its website, as well as a convenient central repository for quick access to the latest Brexit stories.

Creative Execution

The mobile wallet project took less than three weeks to implement, market and deploy. Launching one week before the EU Referendum vote, the pass displayed the latest polling results on the front, switching to voting results as each district’s result was declared on 23 June. Real-time polling and the subsequent voting results were pushed to the pass, and we used the data to automatically generate the image on the front. This enabled customisation of the image, text, and notifications and connected to the Urban Airship Reach product to manage distribution. As a result, the editorial team could send real-time content and notifications, informing pass-holders of breaking news as it happened, driving them to the pass which contained continuously updated story links. Consequently, POLITICO’s smaller, but nimble editorial team could beat larger competitors in breaking stories to their respective audiences. To promote and distribute the pass, POLITICO linked to a landing page in its newsletter, sent emails to existing readers and launched social promotions on Facebook and Twitter. Direct download links were also available, bypassing registration. More than 10,000 passes were added to Apple Wallet by users, each of which received more than a hundred updates over a 5 day timeline.

• More than 10,000 passes were downloaded and activated in Apple Wallet by users in 7 days • 8,700 registrations with contact detail from more than 100 countries • 74% of registered passholders were new readers, not already in POLITICO Europe’s database • One week after voting results, 81% of passes were still addressable, remaining on users’ mobile devices • In a survey of users conducted after the project had ended, the tracker scored and average of 8.48 out of 10, with 95 percent of people saying they were likely to use another POLITICO product in future. • The Politico EU Referendum Tracker wallet pass was successful in helping POLITICO acquire new users, as nearly three quarters (74%) of registered pass users were new to the organization’s database. In terms of geographic breakdown, the highest volume (34%) were from the United Kingdom, but passholders hailed from 104 countries.

The Tracker was designed for busy people who wanted a lightweight, easy way to closely track Brexit. POLITICO wanted to build their audience in the UK, having only recently launched in Europe. They also wanted to test audience response to a high volume of push notifications and whether their tolerance for alerts was higher when they were interested in a single significant story. The wallet was marketed to influential political and policy professionals using POLITICO’s existing email database, via the POLITICO website and on social media. More than half the users completed a survey in the weeks following the vote providing invaluable insight about the product and to the potential of the wallet platform for journalism. This base of users has since formed the seed group of POLITICO’s latest Brexit product, a daily newsletter and the technology and processes are already being reused on other projects.