Vodafone offers free games from Vodafone live! in exchange for ads.

Vodafone customers can, from today, download games to their mobiles from the Vodafone live! portal completely for free in exchange for a mobile ad.

The Free Mobile Games project is conducted by MicroMedia and Vodafone Czech Republic and is an extension of the successful Student SMS Gratis service, which, for nine months now has enabled students to send text messages for free in exchange for a mobile ad. Thanks to this, customers don’t have to pay for great services and advertisers have an effective tool to target the exact customer base that would be interested in their advertising.

“Since September 2007, when we became the first operator in the Czech Republic to launch mobile advertising, this model has attracted over 70 thousand customers and more than forty prominent advertisers,” says Pavel Tihelka, who is responsible for Mobile Advertising Development at Vodafone.

Customers, who want to download these games for free, need only go to the special ‘Sponsored Games’ section off the Vodafone live! portal’s main menu. On it, there’s a list of games for download after the user enters basic information about themselves – birth date, sex, region and e-mail, on the basis of which the game will be attached to a relevant ad.

“The games will be sponsored by a banner ad which will be shown prior to download. Some of them will be more interactive; and in no case will we ever require the player to connect to the Internet to receive a mobile ad. Ads can’t be and won’t be an annoyance, but rather the opposite: they will be related somehow to the game title and may often carry some useful information to the user,” says Jakub Mach, the Director of MicroMedia.

As of today, there are 15 games available on Vodafone live! that customers can download completely for free without even paying for data transfer. Among the games now available for download, are quality titles like Townsmen 4 and My Model Train created by HandyGames. The games portfolio will be continuously expanding. There are games available from different genres and for various types of telephones. The current games on offer are suitable for more than 80 percent of mobile phones. Each user can see those games that are compatible with their particular phone model.

Mobile Ads have been used by over forty advertisers, including: Asiana, Grand Optical, Pepsi, Direct insurance, Baťa, Ford, Hartmann, Barum Continental, Wrigley, ING, Blue Sky Film Distribution, Microsoft, Mercedes, Nokia, Jobs.cz and Student Agency.

To get to Vodafone live!, the vast majority of customers need only press the Vodafone live! button on their keypad or from the phone’s main menu. Some phones, purchased from elsewhere than a Vodafone shop, may need to have Vodafone live! installed. The Customer Care Operator or anyone working in a Vodafone shop can these customers.

More information at: www.vodafone.cz/live