2020 Award Winners: AR/VR, Integrated and Launch Campaign categories

The winners of the 2020 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards were announced at a virtual Awards Ceremony last Friday. Over the next few days, we’re taking a closer look at the winner in each category, continuing today with the winners of the Most Effective AR/VR Campaign, Most Effective Integrated Campaign, and Most Effective Launch Campaign categories…

Most Effective Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality Campaign
7-Eleven and Zappar – Fall Football
7-Eleven has collaborated with Zappar on its 7Rewards app, designed to award customers points that can be redeemed in-store towards 7-Eleven partner products, for the last three years. A central part of their strategy is the concept of ‘always-on’ AR, designed to delight customers and deliver continued, high-quality, value-added experiences by maximising the retailer’s impressive range of brand partnerships. By June 2019, the app had seen over 10m engagements across 30+ mini-games with brands including Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, Doritos, Red Bull, and the Deadpool 2 franchise. The consistency of activations establishes a strong relationship with customers, rewarding regular app usage as well as store visits and, crucially, ensuring it is never considered a novelty feature.

The goals for the Fall Football campaign remained the same: to drive interest towards 7-Eleven’s partners’ products via engaging experiences, as well as driving sales in-store via 7Rewards points. It launched in line with the start of the NFLs sporting season, under the theme ‘Get Game Day Ready.’ The campaign featured a virtual avatar of Dallas Cowboys quarterback and 7-Eleven brand ambassador Dak Prescott. He featured in many of the mini-games, which included an AR field goal challenge, where players kick footballs through goal posts placed in the real world; a mini-game where fans customise the look and end zone dance moves of their avatar; a trick-shot game where players help Dak shoot and knock over branded bottles; and a photo feature, where fans can take a selfie with virtual Dak. To encourage gameplay, virtual Dak appeared in the app to introduce the new games.

The results speak for themselves. Across all five mini-games, the app had more than 2.7m scans over six months, with an average of over 2 minutes dwell time in the app. Over 600,000 videos and photos shared, and over 117m 7Reward points generated to spend in store.

Judges’ View: “The execution here was formidable, merging the AR implementation, immersing customers in the app as they engaged with the games and collected reward points. Also loved the wide variety of engagements, reflected in the fantastic results.”

Most Effective Integrated Campaign
Greenpeace UK, VDX.tv & Opticomm Media – Video-driven Experiences
Greenpeace’s goal with this campaign was to raise awareness among the British public of the importance of protecting our oceans and its wildlife, with a specific focus on how plastic pollution, exploration and oil spills have an ever-increasing threat to the life of turtle species around the world.

Having created a short film with Aardman Animation, Greenpeace created a 30-second teaser video in order to drive traffic to their site to watch the film in full and encourage people to sign a petition for the protection of oceans and wildlife; The Global Ocean Treaty.

As such, the campaign required maximum exposure for the video across as many screens as possible, whilst allowing for a strong messaging component alongside it. Targeting-wise, the activity was to e primarily focused on the 30-50-year-old demographic, using behavioural and contextual cues around environmental, green-living and sustainability topics.

Opticomm Media (Greenpeace UK’s agency of record) collaborated with VDX.tv to create an interactive ad unit to drive the target audience to the Greenpeace homepage to watch the film in full.

A total of 13 expandable and innovative creative ad units were built and deployed for the campaign across instream and in-page placements on desktop and mobile. VDX.tv also employed its extended viewability metric, which is independently verified by MOAT, to offer assurance to the client that their investment was guaranteed to be seen. Only views that reached 5 seconds in-view on mobile were considered billable. In addition to this, the campaign also included desktop and instream ad creatives of which views were calculated on 10 seconds in-view on desktop and 15 seconds in-view on instream.

Within the first seven days, the VDX.tv ad unit was proving to be the main driver for petition sign-ups, generating 3,466 sign-ups. Utilizing the Vdx.tv platform, cost per action decreased by 72 per cent and video completion rate increased by 80 per cent against the benchmark of 70-75 per cent. The engagement rate also increased by 6 per cent, which surpassed benchmarks of 3-4.5 per cent, and ultimately drove petition sign-ups.

Judges’ View: “A smart campaign, employing good creative to showcase an important issue, with impressive results.”

Most Effective Launch Campaign
Gymshark and Yodel Mobile – Gymshark Conditioning App Launch
Health and fitness app statistics show that users are loyal to their favourite apps, with almost 96 per cent only using only one fitness app. The strategy was to ensure that the Gymshark Conditioning App would be that app for their target customers.
There were three stages to the campaign. The first was a pre-launch through a BETA user group, Lifting Club, designed to align the Gymshark team on an app-first strategy and populate the app with a testing group to gather essential data and learnings needed for a seamless app launch.

Gymshark sold Gymshark Black Friday t-shirts with the slogan: Lifting Club. The consumers of the product were then invited privately to join the  BETA app launch. Yodel advised on the mobile tool stack and data set-up, to capture essential learnings during BETA phase. It also built a bespoke ASO (App Store Optimisation) 360 strategy plan and implementation to ensure visibility, organic acquisition and conversion would be high for Gymshark’s app store listing

In the second stage, the official launch, Gymshark implemented a blend of paid campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google AdWords and Apple Search Ads to increase acquisition efforts. Using push messaging and in-app messages, the CRM team pushed more users through the conversion funnel. Email was also used to ramp up acquisition, educate users and increase engagement with the app.

In stage three of the campaign, post-launch optimisation, Yodel conducted analysis and validation work on conversion rates and then advised on how to optimise this, analysing funnel data, from impression through to subscriber. App Store listings, keywords, promo text and targeting were also continually optimised to increase visibility.

The results of the campaign were supplied to the judges in confidence, and were sufficiently impressive for Gymshark and Yodel to take the award in this category.

Judges’ View: “This campaign employed a multi-level strategy that wasnt just about spending money on impressions, actually using multiple approaches to balance out the launch. Good use of owned and organic media channels, also good use of data, and fantastic results.”