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The Beacon Christmas Show

Keeping your customers fully engaged and entertained by our partners Van Ons BV
Kontakt.io has partnered with dozens of innovative companies to create and deliver unique customer experiences with our beacon / iBeacon platform. In this Partner Spotlight, we’re featuring Van Ons BV – a development agency from the Netherlands that provides some of the best-in-class, fully customized solutions on the market, and whose most recent project is the Beacon App for the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision.

Keeping your customers engaged and entertained constantly

Organizing special events with attractions that people love allows you to gain a customer’s loyalty, if not necessarily their hearts. However, the main attraction of the show may take only a small percentage of the time that customers actually spend at the event.
One of the big challenges in event management is how to manage the time before and after the event’s main attraction. Van Ons BV wanted to help keep people entertained while they are waiting to see their favourite show–and while they’re waiting to leave the venue.

Themed Mobile Engagement is key

It’s become a truism in society: when you’re bored and out in public, you take out your phone and find something to interest you. Since people before and after a show will naturally have their phones in hand while waiting, Van Ons BV decided to capitalize on that. In cooperation with their beacon research partner Media599, they created an iBeacon app to feature at an event–a life broadcast of the Top 2000 (an annual holiday-themed radio show with voting) –which will be held at The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.
Due to the extensive research and preparation we did with our partner Media 599 we were able to create and deploy the Beacon App for Sound and Vision in less than two months!
– Sebastiaan van der Lans
The Top 2000 event is organized alongside the famous annual radio program of the same name, broadcast by the Dutch radio station, NPO Radio 2. This 6-7 day broadcast reaches an estimated audience of 11 million–or more than 2/3rds of the country’s population.
Between Christmas and New Year the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision will be visited by more than 15 thousand fans. The iBeacon application will engage customers while they are waiting to get in to the actual event. With a variety of interactive elements, the goal is to keep the visitor experience engaging and fun from beginning to end.

So how will the Beacon Christmas Show work ?

Banners informing attendees about the app will be displayed at the entrance to the event venue and visitors will also receive email notifications to download the app.
When a visitor arrives at the Institute for Sound and Vision, he or she will receive a notification on his or her phone to take part in the Top 2000 quiz.  Entering the queue for the event, every few meters the visitor will approach a new beacon that will trigger a new quiz question.  A video clip of one of the Top 2000 songs from the archive of Sound and Vision will play, and the challenge is to choose from the A and B answer options.
The application gives fans a flavour of what they are going to see during the show and keeps them engaged in an entertaining way.

How Kontakt.io helped Van Ons BV make their first iBeacon app?

Before embarking on their first beacon deployment Van Ons BV tested beacons from various providers. Kontakt.io beacons proved to be the most dependable on the market.
During testing it gave us the best balance between battery lifetime and a constant good quality in range and reliability. This combined with the fact we can use multiple beacons with the same values (as back-up) gave us the confidence to deploy this project for 15k visitors with Kontakt.io.”  – Sebastiaan van der Lans, founder Van Ons, Amsterdam
As well as providing the beacon hardware, Kontakt.io is always on hand to provide the support and practical experience clients need to make their beacon deployments a success.
We like their professionalism. Looking forward doing great things together– Media566

The Results

Stay tuned — we will keep you updated as soon as the Show has finished.
You can also learn about the results during the Beacon Meetup which will be held by Van Ons in February at their office in Herengracht, Amsterdam.

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