One of the most frequent comments one hears from brands and agencies about mobile advertising is the need for good case studies with solid measurement of results – especially case studies about the impact of brand advertising.

For the launch of the recent film “The Golden Compass“, New Line Cinema joined up with Greystripe to run a mobile marketing campaign aimed at engaging movie-goers and raising the awareness, interest, and intent to see movie. Market research firm Dynamic Logic was brought in to measure the branding impact of the campaign. Read about the survey results, and how mobile compares to typical online advertising for films.

---

Many entertainment companies these days are beginning to use mobile as an advertising channel to raise awareness for their product. This raises a big question about how well does it work, and how does it compare with other channels such as online. Greystripe, the mobile games portal, and New Line Cinema recently ran a campaign that provides some insight into this question.

(for more on Greystripe, read the MobiAD interview with Michael Chang, Greystripe CEO, and see the example of Greystripe in-game advertising.)

The campaign ran on Greystripe’s network for about a month starting November 8, 2007, and consisted of full screen images from the film with an option to click to the Golden Compass wap site. Click through rate was 5.6%, but the really interesting results came from the brand impact study.

Full Screen Ad and Wap Site
The survey was conducted over the mobile web, and included over 750 users aged 18 to 55. Survey respondents were separated into “control” and “exposed” groups based on who saw the mobile ads (not only those who had clicked on the ad). The purpose of the study was to identify the impact of the “The Golden Compass” mobile campaign at raising Aided Movie Awareness, Movie Interest, and Movie-Going Intent.

The results were quite striking.

Mobile Ad Awareness
Mobile Ad Awareness measures the extent to which respondents recall seeing The Golden Compass advertised on a WAP site. The question asked was: “Which of the following upcoming movies have you seen advertised on a MOBILE PHONE in the past 30 days? (Check all that apply)”. There was high level of awareness of the mobile ad, with 67% of the people remembering they had seen the ad.

Aided Movie Awareness
The aided awareness of the film experienced a lift of 19.3 percentage points, which represents a 45% increase in awareness for the film.

Movie Interest
Exposure to the mobile ad resulted in a +9.5 percentage-point increase in interest in seeing the film among overall respondents, which is a 23% increased interest in the film.

Moving Going Intent
Impact on intent to go see the film was quite age dependent. The youngest group, 18 to 24 year olds, saw a very big increase in level of intent, from 20% to 34.5%, representing over 70% increase. For older age groups, the increase was much smaller, perhaps indicating that the film’s fantasy theme appealed most to a younger audience.

Compared with Online Advertising
Dynamic Logic also compared these results for mobile advertising with results obtained over a wide variety of online ads for theatrical releases over the course of the past 3 years. At least in this case, the campaign had a much stronger effect than the average online campaign. One contributing reason is certainly that the ad ran full screen on the mobile – so even though the screen is smaller, there was nothing else competing for attention.

Other Interesting Findings
A number of other interesting findings were released from the study:

• Respondents who identified themselves as “Frequent” movie-goers use the mobile Internet more often than those identified as “non-frequent” movie-goers (79% for frequent movie-goers vs. 58% for non movie-goers).
• Among the overall sample, 35% use their mobile phones for “finding theater and movie times” and 29% “watch movie trailers.”
• Mobile ads were most effective among those described as “avid” movie-goers (those who have seen three or more movies in the theater in the past two months).

Conclusions
It is great that companies are starting to do this type of brand impact study, and are sharing the results with the industry. Many people think that mobile advertising will be primarily useful for direct response advertising, but clearly mobile advertising has the capability to be a high impact communications channel for building brand awareness, interest, and consideration.

Let’s hope in the coming months we will see more detailed studies like this to help brands and agencies make the move to mobile advertising.

29.04.2008    Tags: branding, case-study, games