The Mobile VIFF Film Voting System

A major project goal was to offer tools to allow festival attendees to contribute in a meaningful yet fun way, resulting in a more engaging and participatory festival experience; essentially, effecting "two-way" communications between the audience and the festival to the enrichment of both.

We developed several applications to meet this goal, one of which was to allow the audience to vote for and rate films using mobile devices and, more specifically, cast votes for the VIFF's two major audience choice awards. Festival attendees cast some 20,000 votes on paper ballots for films eligible for these awards, rating the film on a scale from 1 to 5.  These ballots are filled in after the screening and deposited into ballot boxes in the theatre lobbies.  They are then hand-tabulated by dozens of volunteers (who also "weed out" spoiled or duplicate ballots) and after the festival the two winning films are announced.  As an enticement to vote, the award sponsors also award high-value prizes (trips for two, etc) to a randomly drawn ballot entrant.

Unfortunately, the festival receives far fewer votes than they might because manually filling-in a ballot is time consuming for voters and they're often rushing off to their next screening.

What we developed allowed attendees to use their mobile device in the theatre immediately after the screening (or later) to easily rate a film on the 1 to 5 scale.  To further entice people to vote using mobile devices, the VIFF put up extra prizes for people who voted this way. However, as a fraud-deterrent, only users who had pre-

registered their mobile phone number with the Mobile VIFF system were eligible to win prizes. 

We provided two primary ways for people to vote mobile.  They could use the interactive mobile film guide by filling out a simple interactive XHTML form, or by text-messaging VOTE plus the VIFF 5-character program code followed by the rating 1 to 5 to the MUSE SMS short-code.  The system then sent a text message to the user to confirm their vote. This last step was necessary to ensure that the vote came from a mobile phone and allowed us to count only one vote per film per phone.

How we publicized the voting feature

Most of the VIFF's printed information, including the souvenir guide, press releases, and other materials included references to the Mobile VIFF and that mobile voting was available.  We also printed 18,000 colour postcards with descriptions on the Mobile VIFF features to raise awareness about the initiative.  The VIFF staff inserted this card into all distributed souvenir guides and made them also made them available at strategic locations including all box-offices, theatres etc.

The VIFF screens humorous short Festival information reels prior to each program screening that encourage people to vote for their favourite films and this year included a nudge to use the mobile voting system.  In addition, the paper ballots (which were still extensively used by attendees) included instructions on how to vote via mobile.

The results and what we learned

In spite of what we felt were intense efforts to encourage people to vote via mobile, the number of votes cast this way was disappointing to say the least.  Less than 100 votes were cast this way.

In an effort to understand why the numbers were so low, we are currently conducting a survey that examines the VIFF audience's awareness of the mobile features - including voting - and will post results here when available.

However, it seems pretty clear now that the general population here in Vancouver is not nearly as mobile-savy as we had believed and others had predicted.  This antipathy to the applications we presented, despite our best and very successful efforts to publicize them, was evidenced by the usage figures we saw for all the Mobile VIFF applications.  We can only hope that the general public will begin to see the benefits of mobile technology beyond voice soon and begin to use applications like ours in significant numbers.

Certainly, there are barriers to adoption of any new technology on the part of users; however, I personally believe that we did a good job in making it simple for people to use our applications, and that we could not have done much more to publicize the Mobile VIFF system.  Thus, the only conclusion I can reach is that we - as a population - are still only beginning to adopt these technologies and it will be some time before these see general, mainstream use.  It's well known that users in Europe and Asia use data-centric mobile applications far more than here.  It is generally held that this is due to the fact that voice calls there are much more expensive than here and users find text messaging a cheap alternative and use it constantly.  Thus, they are inherently more aware of how mobile applications work and how to use them. Here, the majority of users do not even know how to send a text message, and even if they know how, would generally rather just make a voice call.