There’s a large population for whom October means neither football nor elections nor leaf-watching nor Halloween costume crunch time: It is, primarily and pre-eminently, “Monopoly at McDonald’s” time. The campaign has just begun its 2008 season, which will run until Nov. 3 in participating restaurants and online at www.PlayatMcD.com through Nov. 17.

With a long-running promotion, one primary task is to keep it fresh for players, and this year McDonald’s and its agency The Marketing Store have come up with some new wrinkles. In the basic game, players’ food purchases collect tokens that correspond to properties on the Monopoly board, and they can win prizes by collecting all the properties in a color group or selected other properties such as railroads.

Starting in 2004, McDonald’s added the online “second chance” component to the in-store promotion. Players can go to the Web site and enter a code on the game token that lets them take a roll of the Monopoly dice; if they land on a property they don’t already own, they get to add it to their collection.

This year McDonald’s and The Marketing Store have added a mobile element to the online game. Players can text an access code contained on their game token to mobile short code 96363. If they reply to a text message with their birth year (and if that year means they’re 13 or older), they will get another message with a five-digit PIN. They’ll also get the randomly-generated results of their game play—i.e., they’ll be told what they rolled, and what they landed on.

When users register at the www.PlayatMcD.com Web site for the online game, they can use the mobile PIN to link their holdings in the online game to the properties they’ve collected in the text game. Users must go register for the online game after submitting eight text codes. Once registered, they can submit up to ten text codes a day, assuming they’re willing to shoot for that kind of Morgan Spurlock-like Quarter Pounder diet.

“McDonald’s serves such a large cross-section of consumers and a wide range of age groups that we’re always trying to deliver to them in a way that’s meaningful and easy,” says Chris Hess, account director at The Marketing Store Worldwide. “Up until recently McDonald’s core consumer has not been mobile-savvy, but that’s been changing over the last few years. We dipped our toe in the water last year with a mobile prize and got a tremendous response. So this year we decided to jump in with both feet and make the game playable over the mobile phone for the first time.”

“This is the first time there’s been a mobile and online collect-and-win game done in North America,” says Marketing Store interactive strategy vice president Geoff Miller. “Logistically it’s been pretty complex to figure out, but we’re excited to do it because we’ve seen some great participation already.” Speaking on Oct. 8, just a day after the latest game launched, 20% of the codes being entered were coming through the mobile channel, according to Miller.

“That’s pretty substantial because this is still not a well-known way to play,” he says. “Hopefully this will open the game up to a new set of players.” One benefit to including a mobile channel is that players of the online game don’t have to wait until they get home and sit down in front of their computers to find out what properties they’ve collected and what prizes they may have won.

“Now you can play the online game in the store, at your desk or in the back seat of your car,” Miller says.

Verification works the same way as the online game; in order to claim prizes, players must eventually submit the game pieces that earned them the winning dice rolls and the needed properties.

Rather than possible fraud, the big hurdle for The Marketing Store was engineering the collect-and-win function into the mobile part of the Monopoly at McDonald’s game. “A lot of companies have done mobile instant-win games, but this is the first time a collect-and-win game has been tried,” says Hess. “On the back end, we’re tracking what properties you already own, adding your online winnings to the mobile ones and making sure everything is associated with the correct registered account. It’s really trailblazing.”

“There are a billion game codes out there in the McDonald’s Monopoly universe, and they all have the chance of being entered into the online or mobile game in the space of one month,” Miller points out. “We’re running at multiple code entries per second that all have to be synched up. That’s not easy.”

To support the text functions, The Marketing Store is using text services from U.K.-based Telescope, the company that handles SMS voting for “American Idol” and its British predecessor and about 100 other participation TV properties. Unlike “Idol”, which relies solely on text messaging through AT&T, Monopoly at McDonald’s players can text in through any of the major U.S. wireless carriers.

Apart from building a new level of instant excitement into the game, McDonald’s and The Marketing Store also wanted to strengthen the campaign’s appeal for specific demographic groups including young people, African Americans and Hispanics—all of whom, research has shown, are more reliant on text messaging than the average wireless user.

“We know all those groups are far advanced in their use of mobile,” Hess says. “And there’s a great deal of appeal in incorporating that function into a game as broad as Monopoly at McDonald’s. While we didn’t go into this thinking we needed to target those groups specifically, the ability to deliver something that’s easier for them to access and participate in was certainly key.

Basically, adding mobile was a necessary step in continually delivering a better gaming tier. It’s something we felt we needed to do.”