Australian innovative marketing company, Media Merge, has designed a developed a novel new way to deliver discount vouchers to consumers.

Media Merge's Skwirrel system allows participating Merchants to advertise discounts which can be obtained by consumers via mobile phone SMS. Advantages of the Skwirrel system include:

• Merchants only participate from week-to-week and can change their Offer to exploit latent capacity;
• Consumers obtain only the Vouchers they wish to use and do not need to purchase "books" of vouchers which will mostly go to waste;
• Consumers are encouraged to impulse purchase through advertising of current Offers;
• SMS delivery of Vouchers is instant and convenient.

Merchants are able to login and edit their Offers or report in real-time on the status of their advertised Offers.

Merchants are also able to manage and record customer redemptions via handheld mobile devices supplied by Media Merge. These devices connect to the live Skwirrel system, capturing customer visits for real-time reporting.

Goals included:

• Ability for Media Merge to be able to easily manage large campaigns with minimal effort;
• Ability for Merchants to configure their Offers themselves;
• Tight integration with development partners for SMS Gateway, mobile device interface and external promotion;
• Delivery of a robust, high-availability system able to handle large numbers of requests;
• An easy-to-use and intuitive system that requires minimal training and support.

Benefits include:

• On-demand Vouchers for consumers;
• Online update of Offers by Merchants allowing them to respond to redemption response and seasonal opportunities;
• A low cost mechanism for Merchants to obtain additional business at times that they have capacity;
• A low cost way for Consumers to obtain discounts for services they would like to try;
• A cost effective way for Media Merge to help both Merchants and Consumers for mutual benefits;
• Provision of accurate summary statistics in real-time, resulting in ability to manage the whole process.

The Skwirrel system executes on the IBM e-business infrastructure - using IBM WebSphere Application Server; IBM DB2; Java; and Java Server Pages. The use of the IBM technology infrastructure provides enterprise-standard performance, reliability and robustness.

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