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. Today, we’re previewing some of the most cutting-edge entries with our Most Innovative Campaign nominees.

American Airlines, Mobsta and Mediacom – Brand Campaign
American Airlines is a strong global brand, but in the UK, it struggles against the likes of British Airways and Virgin, with less than 5 per cent share of the UK long-haul market. It was looking to secure more Business Class customers from the UK.

By cross-referencing American Airlines traveller data with the members of the British-American Business Council (which has over 2,000-member companies), Mediacom had established that Business Class travellers who travel regularly to the USA are heavily concentrated in 2 London locations: Canary Wharf and The City, so the entire media solution was focused in these areas.

The campaign targeted travellers in London’s iconic Black Cabs. American Airlines ‘wrapped’ 85 taxis (along with tip-on seats and receipts) that were predominantly based around Canary Wharf and The City. In a media first, these moving vehicles were also geofenced. Exposed devices were identified by connecting to the taxi API platform, enabling the taxi GPS to be geofenced and capturing device IDs within this moving geofence. These devices were then retargeted with a unique kind of location-informed sequential messaging via the user’s mobile devices, ensuring that the messaging on the taxi media was reinforced to the target audience, via their smartphone.

People exposed to both taxis and mobile advertising saw a significant shift in purchase intent of 8.8 percentage points; an 8.6 percentage point shift in brand familiarity; and a positive shift in unaided brand awareness of 1.6 percentage points. The wider campaign saw an overall increase of 9.8 percentage points in purchase intent, driven predominantly by taxi and mobile activity.

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.

Marmite and AnalogFolk – Marmite TasteFace
Previously, Marmite had used its digital channels to drive cultural relevance and provide product information, but with its TasteFace campaign, the brand was looking to find a way to leverage these channels, and mobile in particular, to increase the amount of people actually trying Marmite. The TasteFace campaign focused on asking consumers to test whether they had “the Marmite Gene”, and working with AnalogFolk, the team created a responsive web app that used facial recognition to analyse user reactions to Marmite when they tasted it.

The web app was built using the Microsoft Emotion API, which can recognise facial expressions across eight key emotions. Using the web app, consumers could request a free sample and then take the TasteFace test, analysing their reaction to provide them with a score, as well as GIF of their unique reaction that could be shared on social media.

So far, Marmite has distributed over 150,000 samples as part of the campaign, with 550,000 people visiting the TasteFace microsite, spending an average of 3.75 minutes exploring the content there. During the campaign, Marmite sales in Tescos increased by a massive 60 per cent, and the campaign also provided the brand with extensive information on consumers, particularly geographic location and taste preferences, all of which can be used in subsequent campaigns.

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.

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.

The Body Shop and Urban Airship – Forever Against Animal Testing Mobile Wallet Pass
As part of its Forever Against Animal Testing campaign, The Body Shop worked alongside Urban Airship to develop and launch a bespoke mobile wallet pass. The campaign aims to end animal testing on cosmetics worldwide through a petition which will be presented to the UN after receiving 8m signatures, and the mobile pass, with its high visibility on users’ devices, strong retention rate and ability to distribute ongoing content, was used to drive awareness and collect signatures.

When signing the petition online, users were offered the ability to download the pass to their iOS smartphone, and thanks to the sharing capabilities built into the solution, could then promote the campaign easily to their friends, encouraging further signatures. The pass also enabled The Body Shop to keep users up to date on the latest developments and signature counts through updates to the pass, as well as push notifications.

“Mobile wallet passes offer us the perfect vehicle to spread the work and grow support for our efforts to end cosmetic animal testing globally once and for all,” said Harriet Williams, chief digital officer at The Body Shop. “The ease of creating, distribution and updating mobile wallet passes, combined with the high rate of social sharing, will help finish what The Body Shop started when we began campaigning against animal testing in the 1980s.”

Since launching the mobile wallet pass, The Body Shop has seen thousands of installs, more than 75 per cent of which came through organic sharing, rather than being distributed through the brand’s channels. In addition, only 1.12 per cent of shares were to 16 or more devices, showing that people, not aggregators, were driving this peer-to-peer behaviour. More than one year into the campaign, fewer than 10 per cent of passes have been uninstalled, and the Forever Against Animal Testing campaign has collected over 7m signatures to date.

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.