Awards Preview – Mobile Ad Campaign

We continue our preview of the finalists for the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards today with a look at the contenders in the Most Effective Mobile Advertising Camapign category.

There are seven finalists. The first is Hotels.com and Fetch for Hotel.com’s 2012 Global Mobile Marketing Campaign to drive downloads of the Hotels.com mobile apps. The campaign spanned multiple countries and required copy to be written in multiple languages. The results are commercially sensitive, but hugely impressive.

Next up is McDonald’s and OMD for the McDonald’s Extended Hours campaign, which was  designed to drive business into McDonald’s late night stores. But with two thirds of its restaurants closing at 11pm, it employed location-based, geo-fence technology, supported by geo-targeted above-the-line messaging, to avoid sending potential customers to a locked door.

At the heart of the campaign was a “restaurant finder” app to enable consumers to find a late-night McDonald’s. The campaign was designed to drive downloads of the app, something it succeeded in doing. Over the course of the campaign, the app was downloaded 1.3m times.
The third contender in this category is Millennial Media & M/Six for their campaign for Carphone Warehouse. The campaign aimed to grow the mobile retailer’s share of voice, and drive awareness of both the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Galaxy range, available instore and on the mobile-optimised site. The campaign also had to promote a free gift card, using the TV creative and rich media mobile ad units to reach a broader, engaged audience. That’s a lot of metrics to be judged on, but in every respect, the campaign exceeded its targets.

How do you convince mobile users in Germany who are happy with their iPhone or Android handset to give the Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone a chance to impress them. That was the challenge Nokia and YOC set out to overcome with their ‘Mystery’ campaign for the Nokia device. The ad effectively replaced the iPhone or Android user interface with the Windows Phone interface for as long as users were engaged with the rich media ad, enabling them to see at first hand how it differs, and, in Nokia’s eyes of course, improves on their existing experience. Not surprisingly, the campaign delivered outstanding results.

The fifth campaign aiming for glory in this category comes from Papa Johns and Net Media Planet. Their ‘The Price Isn’t Always Right’ campaign aimed to drive sales of pizzas and side dishes and drinks, without resorting to discounting. Appetite-inducing messages encourage hungry consumers to buy more when ordering their pizzas, thus driving up average order value. The campaign was a huge success, driving up order values, increasing revenue-per-click, conversions and margin.

With the Starbucks Rewards campaign, from Starbucks and Manning Gottlieb OMD, the coffee chain aimed to reward its loyal community. It used the O2 Media database to offer Starbucks Reward Card holders 50p off the price of a cup of its new instant coffee brand, VIA, in order to encourage trial of the product. The discount coupons were also distributed to non-Reward Card holders within 250m of a Starbucks store, using O2’s geo-fencing technology. Rich media ads were also used to remind Starbucks customers that filter coffee costs just £1 for loyalty card holders. The campaigns all delivered excellent results, proving mobile’s power as a sales promotion tool.

The final contender is Yodelmobile for its role in partnership between O2 and Jobsite. The partnership was developed to raise further awareness of the Jobsite brand through a dedicated ‘Careers’ section on O2 Active, O2’s mobile site, and supported by targeted messaging campaigns to O2 subscribers; You Are Here location-based SMS campaigns; and takeovers on the O2 Active site. Yodelmobile manages the partnership, created the dedicated Careers section, and managed the targeted messaging campaigns.

The messaging campaigns delivered impressive clickthrough rates, and the partnership succeeded in increasing the number of mobile Jobsite users, and awareness of the Jobsite brand. The campaign also delivered in terms of ROI.

Once again then, the size of the task facing the judges in choosing the winner in this category is clear. You can find out who they chose at the Awards Ceremony, which takes place on 29 November at the London Film Museum on the site of County Hall on South Bank, a stones throw from the London Eye. The event is almost sold out, but there are still a few places left. To book your place, contact Lisa Slavin by email or telephone +44 (0) 20 7183 5285. Individual seats cost £250; a table of 10 costs £2,150.

The 2012 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards are sponsored by  Openmarket, 7Digital, Celtra and Propel. To find out more about how to get your business or brand involved, contact John Owen by email or telephone on +44 (0) 77696 74824.