DigitalFWD going forward with Social WiFi

Background

Award winning digital agency, DigitalFWD, approached Social WiFi in 2018 looking for a system that would enhance their ad delivery network across South Africa. Their mantra of keep it simple was raised early and they voiced their desire not to have a complex system for WiFi users nor their clients.

Free WiFi usage remains huge in South Africa and many of their clients are upgrading their internet connectivity to fibre, so this presented the opportunity for DigitalFWD to propose a revenue generating product to offset some of the investment costs over time.

The Challenge

In South Africa, the concept of providing guest WiFi to communicate better with guests is still maturing. Instead, more focus is paid to digital advertising and screen banner ads. Because Social WiFi is more focused on providing enhanced guest experience through automation tools, some customisations were required to fulfil this need.

Logistically, there were challenges for DigitalFWD also. Their clients were using a variety of hardware from different vendors to provide their WiFi. More often than not, this was years out of date and not strong enough to handle the concurrent users that modern networks have to handle. With this in mind, DigitalFWD needed a provider who understood the challenges of different hardware vendors and provide guidance on how to best serve their clients.

The Solution

Social WiFi developed a URL redirection post login that enabled DigitalFWD to move WiFi users from the Social WiFi captive portal to their own designed ad delivery platform. This meant that DigitalFWD could garner more detailed analysis of how many impressions their ads were getting and make optimisation changes faster due to it being hosted on their own Content Management System.

The standard process of keeping users connected for a minimum of one hour was also adjusted for the purpose of ad delivery. A 20-minute session length was implemented across all their locations to provide even more exposure for their advertisers.

DigitalFWD also migrated away from MikroTik hardware and with the guidance and education of the Social WiFi support team, became fully independent on the planning and deployment of Ubiquiti Unifi hardware.

The Result

With the campaign, DigitalFWD managed to icrease the revenue of in-venue sales from ads, as well as the sales of pre-login advertised products. It helped them acquire more big brand advertisers on the WiFi networks.