In London at the moment Nike are running a small outdoor promotional event that lets you jump the queue at Nike ID. Apparently, there is currently a three month waiting list for appointments at the Oxford Street store. These cubes create a countdown and when it gets to zero, creates a Bluetooth broadcast that announces if you are a winner or not. So the promotion is a reward for simply being in the Bluetooth broadcast area of one of these cubes.
Or at least it is supposed to be, as when I stood there it didn’t seem to be working.
According to the promotion guy there have been a number of problems.
Firstly, when it was working, they broadcast every 15 minutes. Lots of people were eagerly waiting and very few actually won. So they dropped the time to every 3 minutes. And there have been problems in the Bluetooth broadcast (like I experienced). So it’s a neat idea but it falls down when it doesn’t actually work. Given the popularity of the ID studios, this is a simple and effective idea – the cube pops up in a few high traffic areas (this was in Soho Square on November 13th) and some lucky people get to jump the queue. It was visually stunning on a drab winter afternoon (although these pictures don’t really do it justice) and there were a fair few people around waiting.
