Cocktail Compass app finds the nearest cheap drink

Need a cab ride to get there? No problem.

Emergency happy hour need? Search by neighborhood.

The listing includes click to call, maps and special offers.

The web page promoting the Cocktail Compass on portlandmercury.com has a video walk through of the app.

The hyper-competitive TheStranger claims to have trumped its competitor Seattle Weekly in downloads of its Happy Hour app, Cocktail Compass.

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The Cocktail Compass is a great example of an mobile app developed for a specific local niche, in this case to extend the bars and club franchise.  The app was developed in-house by alternative weekly, The Portland Mercury. It has since been deployed by The Stranger, in Seattle and nine other affiliate papers.  

Strategy
The app opens up with the yellow martini (see images to the right and click to enlarge), a "shameless plug for brand," for the four to eight seconds it takes to download the data.

Then the phone geo-locates happy hours closest to you via GPS, beginning with the one that is closest and ending the soonest.

You can also narrow choices by neighborhood, or bar feature, which includes WiFi, food and pool. Then find directions, click-to-call, or click-to-call a cab. The business model is both sales of banner ads at the bottom of the "page" and sponsorship or pay-per-lead from taxi cab companies. 

The Stranger's development team built the app to work from its own CMS system, called "The foundation" used by 30 or so alt weeklies, or from any database with an easy API. 

Results
Mercury Pubisher Rob Crocker says the app is mostly about expanding the brand.

"The only way we've been able to sell is by bundling ad sales with print. It's not a big revenue stream." 

Still the app has 32,500 downloads in Portland, and more than 49.000 in Seattle.  To sell out the app in Seattle, the company created a happy hour supplement also called Cocktail Compass and bundled in the app banner sales. The effort paid off in $6000 in banner sales for the next six months, in addition to print sales. Since the supplement is bi-annual, that's about $12000 for the year. 

If you are interested in trying this in your own market, the app is available to affiliates for a one time charge of $2500. The nine markets including Boise, Idaho, a much smaller town of 80,000 which now has about 500 apps downloaded so far.

The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and  MediaExecsTech,  developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine,  to showcases perspectives from around the  world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.

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