Ahead of our 2018 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, well be previewing the nominees in each category, giving you a glimpse at the high quality of entries weve seen this year. Social media gives brands and consumers alike a unique way to connect. These entries all made the most of this powerful channel to reach and engage their audiences.

BBC News and Urban Airship – Royal Wedding Weekend BBC News Rich Notifications
Around 24m people in the UK watched the wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle on 19 May. The BBC covered the event on broadcast television as well as online and on mobile through its news app, which uses notifications powered by Urban Airship. But the BBC and Urban Airship realised that not all of the app’s users would want push notifications about the event, so an initial alert was sent inviting users to opt in to receiving extra news on the wedding. Each subsequent notification to those who opted in included an ‘Unfollow’ button, making it easy to unsubscribe from the wedding notifications.

2 per cent of the BBC News app audience responded to the interactive notification campaign which is 4 times higher than the media industry’s average engagement rate of 0.5 per cent. 300,000 of those who interacted with the notification chose to receive the extra notifications.

An analysis of BBC News’s notifications sent to this targeted segment compared to broadcast (untargeted) Royal Wedding notifications from five similar UK news organisations showed that BBC News’s strategy achieved a direct open rate across the campaign of 13 per cent, which was more than 4 times higher than the other news outlets’ notifications average engagement rate. The best performing notification for BBC News achieved a 30 per cent direct open rate which is extremely high for apps from any industry, especially media. The campaign also had an extremely strong retention rate, with only 12 per cent of users choosing to unfollow the extra notifications throughout the day of the wedding.

Oreo, Blis and Carat – Oreo: Cookie Quest
Following the release of several new Oreo flavours and products in 2017, the brand was looking for a campaign that would turn consumers’ attention back toward the core Vanilla Oreo product. With families and children forming a key audience for the product, Oreo took inspiration from location-based apps such as Pokémon Go and created a game called ‘Cookie Quest’ that was available as both a standalone app and a rich media creative.

The first step in the campaign was to profile relevant audiences, with location tracking used to identify families at key locations such as commuter stations, family holiday destinations and toy stores. Rich media advertising was then delivered to profiled audiences when they were at home, close to stores stocking Oreo core products, or in proximity of an Oreo out-of-home site at Tottenham Court Road station, with creative changing depending on location.

The campaign delivered fantastic results against its objective of increasing sales of the core Oreo product, with 5.9 per cent footfall uplift to stores and out-of-home locations, and multipack sales of Oreo’s core product up almost 20 per cent during the campaign. Oreo felt that the campaign helped the brand reconnect with consumers by focusing back on the core product and the firm’s family audience, as well as demonstrating the power of playful creative to deliver true ROI.

Mubaloo and Initiative UK – The World’s First Alexa-powered, Interactive Ad Unit
Mubaloos colleagues at Initiative discovered that there were two critical barriers in the purchase journey for Amazon Echo devices: education and understanding. Using Initiatives proprietary cultural insights tool, Recode, they identified that many ‘Early Mass’ customer believe that voice assistants, “sound more trouble than they’re worth”. Through further qualitative and shopper research, they found that a customer’s first engagement with Alexa and the Echo was pivotal in their decision-making process.

They needed to find a way for people to try Alexa before buying an Echo device. To do so, they baked Alexa into an ad unit, writing the code and designing the best UX for our customers’ first interaction with Alexa. The campaign was delivered through bespoke display ad units delivered through programmatic partners, and native advertising placements through partnerships with OATH and TAN ad networks.
The results were shared with the judges in confidence, but were very impressive. 

MGM and Publicis Sapient – PlayMGM
When it came to launching its real money gambling app in New Jersey, MGM was faced with a category filled with a sea of similar apps that often offered identical products, with marketing heavily based on promotions to snare new customers. To distinguish itself, PlayMGM sought a heavy-brand launch campaign that would give its app a longer shelf life than its competitors while also driving market growth and capturing market share.

The team employed a psychographics-first audience strategy, determining behaviours closely tied to online gambling and building four new target segments that were cross-referenced with behavioural signals. The fully-integrated media strategy focused on bringing the glamour and thrill of Las Vegas to New Jersey, with native mobile elements that featured interactive poker challenges.

The ‘Vegas is Here’ campaign drove over 30,000 registrations, outpacing the firm’s forecasts by 74 per cent without cannibalising the audience of existing sister apps. The PlayMGM app jumped to the number two spot in the category, with brand awareness and brand favourability both up by 10 per cent.

The Telegraph and Fetch – Words Chosen Well
The Telegraph identified the need to start building the next generation of loyal, Telegraph readers. With their traditional print audience (male, 55+, affluent) naturally in decline, and in the face of rapidly-changing consumer behaviour, it was now more important than ever to make the Telegraph brand relevant to a new, younger, mobile-first audience. Most of this submission was marked confidential, which limits the amount we can say about it. But in essence, the key objective was to drive more registrations since registered readers are more likely to become paying subscribers than non-registered readers.

By connecting data and editorial on a real-time media basis, and using a combination of mobile, out of home, social, programmatic and podcasts, the Telegraph drove a significant shift in brand relevancy and exceeded its targets for the number of new registered users. The campaign also outperformed its KPIs in a number of other areas. These results were shared with the judges in confidence.

Very.co.uk and Fetch – Winning the Christmas Retail Race on the Second Screen
Christmas is the most important time of the year for Very.co.uk, with a significant percentage of its annual sales coming in during the October-to-December period, which ramps up from Black Friday to the end of the year sales. Lacking the budget of Argos, Currys or John Lewis, Very decided that it’s smartest approach to TV advertising would be to win the race for the second screen: mobile.

During the Christmas 2017 period, Very.co.uk took several steps to ensure it would ‘win Christmas’ on the second screen. Mobile ads served on target customers’ favourite apps were synchronised with TV campaigns by Very and its competitors, with gamified rich media units used to engage customers. Spotify playlists with ‘party’ in the name were targeted with audio advertising, performance activity was used throughout November and December to convert sales, and geo-targeting and location-based strategies were used to target busy shoppers in Very’s target audiences.

The campaign was highly successful, smashing Very.co.uk’s target for year-on-year sales growth by almost three times. 73 per cent of seasonal online sales came via mobile, while second screening activity boosted brand awareness by 10 per cent. The integrated strategy managed to break through the noise of other retailers’ promotions and reached key target audiences in the moments that really mattered.

Join us to find out the winners of our 2018 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards at our prestigious Awards Ceremony on 15 November. Tickets are available now, so book your place and celebrate the industrys best and brightest with us.