The deadline for the 2015 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, sponsored by Theorem, is now less than five weeks away. As the deadline approaches, we are turning the spotlight on one of last year’s winners each week, looking at what gave the winning entry the edge over the competition.

This week, our focus is on the Most Effective Programmatic Buying Campaign. This was the first year we had included this category, and it was won by Tesco, along with its partners Qriously and Initiative London, for a campaign to promote Tesco’s free click-and-collect service, and its paid home delivery services.

Qriously’s platform encourages users to declare the things they are interested in by asking questions via in-app banner ads. For this campaign, two questions were served. The first asked consumers whether buying groceries in store made them feel tired, bored or rushed. The second asked consumers, assuming they were busy people, if they would like their groceries to be ready at the store or delivered for less.

Anyone who clicked on one of the answers to either question was then retargeted programmatically with an ad, either for Tesco’s free click and collect service, or for its home delivery service, depending on how they had answered the question.

Because the ads only targeted a self-selected audience, the performance of the campaign far exceeded that of a typical mobile ad campaign. 36,775 people answered one of the two questions. They were then exposed to more than half a million impressions of ads promoting one of the two Tesco services, with each consumer retargeted on average six times, with ads relevant to the answer they had chosen, promoting either the free click-and-collect or £1 home delivery service.

By focusing the ads on those consumers most likely to be interested in the messaging and the offer, the campaign delivered an average clickthrough rate of 3.88 per cent, and a total unique clickthrough rate of 32.29 per cent, both way above industry standards.

The final deadline for this year’s Awards is less than seven weeks away, but to avoid a late-entry fee, you should aim to get your entries in before the Early Bird deadline of 24 July. The Awards, which are now in their sixth year, recognise excellence in mobile marketing across 36 categories, and attracted more than 200 entries each year.

This year sees several new categories added, including Most Effective Smartwatch App, Most Accessible App, and Most Effective Publisher Offering. In addition to the 36 standard categories, there’s also a Grand Prix Award for the best entry overall, and our four People’s Choice Awards, with the shortlist drawn up by a panel of industry experts and the winners chosen by a public vote. The People’s Choice categories and shortlist will be announced in the weeks to come.

The Awards Ceremony will take place on 26 November in London. For more information and details on how to enter the Awards, head for the Awards website.

For information on sponsoring the Awards, please contact john.owen@mobilemarketingmagazine.com