Mobile Advertising: Does Adidas Show it’s Already Here?
“This year is the year of mobile marketing.” That statement always raises chuckles among advertisers, but the “Exchange Series V: What Can Mobile Do For You?” shows that in the US Market, mobile advertising has been done with success. And yes, with actual case studies to boot not the “vagueness” that Alisa has described as being the theme of other ad:tech sessions.
On the panel included David Gale (Vibes Media), Gene Keenan (Isobar Communications) and
Chris Murphy (adidas USA). Their case studies focused around Transformers, Adidas and Verizon. Beyond the QA session provided for a pretty good best practices introduction to mobile advertising.
The Adidas case study was by far the most impressive. It demonstrated that a coordinated campaign - from TV commercials to in-store retail placement - can be all tied together with mobile tactics to create a campaign that can engage with their audience on personal level.
Introduction: Mobile Usage in the US
Before launching into the case studies, David Gale (Vibes Media) and Gene Keenan (Isobar) gave a quick walk through the state of the mobile landscape for the US:
- Mobile phone users with SMS is nearly universal
- MMS usage (SMS with photos or video) has never taken off
- QR Codes are taking off outside the US, but only limited in the US. I’ve seen QR codes used in San Francisco, but only in small campaigns.
- Voice: There are lots of examples of adlib-like voice-based campaigns. Snakes on a Plane, Transformers and Adidas are all examples of this. A person an send a customized message, say of Optimize Prime from Transformers or Samuel Jackson from Snakes on a Plane, created and have that message played to a friend via a phone call.
- Location Based Service (LBS): LBS is “lots of talk, little action”, but there a Range Rover application that will automatically detect the location of the user and show a map of the nearby dealers.
The panelist gave one example of a Valentines Day themed marketing campaign where a person can either choose to download Valentine’s Day wallpaper, enter to win a trip to Cancun with their date or send a virtual “kiss”. When polling the audience, surprisingly the vast majority of the attendees thought people chose to enter a trip to Cancun.
If the attendees remember anything about Facebook and the ability to “poke”, send virtual “gifts” and virtual “kisses” to a Facebook friend ...they’d know the actual answer. And yes, the answer was the virtual “kiss” was the most common choice with the Cancun sweepstakes being deadlast.
Case Study: Transformers the Movie
Sadly, when the panelist polled the audience, I appeared to be the only soul who have watched Transformers (not once, but twice). This probably reveals a generation gap I have with most of the attendees at ad:tech.
Transformers and Adidas both ran a mobile campaign that followed the Snakes on the Plane model. Customized via a website, Optimus Prime can call one’s friend with a custom message along with a call to action to both create their own message or buy the Transformers DVD.
Results
- 1.27 million unique recipients in 20 days (63.5k people per day)
- Re-transmission rate of 2.21:1 (Meaning for every 1 message sent, ~2.21 people sent another)
- When the campaign ended, people posed as movie execs to turn the campaign back on
I was genuinely excited about the idea of receiving a call from Optimus Prime and wish the campaign was still one. The rest of the attendees, while probably impressed by the results, were decidedly less enthusiastic.
Case Study: Adidas’ “Basketball is a Brotherhood” Campaign
Next up was the Adidas’ “Basketball is a Brotherhood” campaign. While mobile was a large component of the campaign, Adidas emphasized that mobile is best used a a tactical part of a larger campaign.
The campaign consisted of bringing in 6 major NBA players (Gilbert Arenas, Chauncey Billups, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Dwight Howard and Tracy McGrady) down to a personal level and have them interact with NBA fans. The interaction was similar to the Transformers campaign, but a far more sophisticated, immersive and personal level.
The message of the campaign to emphasize the team spirit of basketball - hence, the “Brotherhood” - and featured television, print, mobile and in-store retail components. It touched on whereever and whenever there was an opportunity to interact with Adidas’ target audience.
- Adidas ran both television commercials and billboard campaigns asking people to text adidas
- All creatives were tagged with a different 5-digit SMS code for tracking purposes
- Person would receive a call from one of the athletes every 7 to 10 days:
David notes that having people engaged, “If you do it as a one time thing, you’re doing people a disservice”. Over 4-6 weeks, the person would receive a pre-recorded message from all of the 6 NBA players. Only tiny portion of people opted-out of the campaign - Adidas retail locations featured their own SMS number. People who texted the in-store SMS number would receive a call from T-Mac, Dwight Howard and others about what shoes and apparels they used and why
- People could also create custom voicemails featuring the voices of any of the six NBA players via an online website for the mobile phones. Simplicity was key in that they were able to set the voicemail remotely without having a person record the voicemail to their phone.
The overall success was marked by what David called “incredibly small” number of people who opted out. Also, the phone numbers that was used to push-out the recorded message from NBA players were swamped with voicemails. Fourth-five percent of the people who participated in the campaign, called back and left voicemails for the NBA players. That’s an incredible level of engagement.
Case Study: Adidas Las Vegas Campaign
Adidas also had a local Las Vegas campaign that used similar tactics to the “Brotherhood” campaign. It included the placement a large store along the Las Vegas Strip and many strategic placements of ads along the strip, including having the Statue of Liberty replica where an Adidas jersey with the SMS number on it.
The basis of the campaign centered around notification of “exclusive” or “limited” shoes and when they would be available at the Adidas store. The text campaign was follow-up in the evening with “what’s going on tonight”-type message, listing the types of events and places athletes would hang out at. On average, 4 to 5 SMS messages were sent a day.
The campaign resulted in over 2000% increase in sales over a regular day at an Adidas store. Impressive as it is, this boost seemed more centered around the use of limited edition shoes and having the store launch the shoes with Djs and other entertainment. Mobile was just used as method to notify people when these exclusive sales were happening.
Case Study: Verizon and the Pirates of the Caribbean
Finally, there was the Verizon campaign, which while still interested, was a smaller scale campaign. The aim of the Pirates of the Caribbean campaign was to encourage a higher “AR/Per User” (average revenue per user) - basically increasing usage and thus revenue per Verizon user.
The Verizon campaign was based on a Pirates of the Caribbean movie launch. Verizon ran a commerical encouraged their broadband enabled Verizon users to download an exclusive advance trailer of the film on their phones. The result was a very high conversion rate: out of ~50 million subscribers, several million users downloaded the trailer.
Unfortunately, I forgot to ask if there was any follow-up to this campaign, since Chris at Adidas earlier mentioned that it was critical to make engagement on mobile be not a one time event.
The panelist was surprisingly honest in saying the Verizon commercial showed a simulated trailer that was higher in quality than what a Verizon user would actually see. He also stressed that people had to download the trailer; live streaming was not available for the trailer.
Q&A Session: Aka Best Practices
The Q&A session was very interesting and become essentially a “best practices” for mobile marketing beginners.
Question: On how to Schedule the Automated Calls
In the Adidas and Transformers campaign, they made sure no calls were made to user’s phones after 1am. Technically, a person could schedule the calls, but they opted to hardwire the time.
Question: On Getting a short 5-digit SMS code
- Typically 4 to 12 weeks ago receive a code (can be as long as 6 months)
- There are three types of Codes via USShortCodes.com
- USShortCodes is the national register, much like Network Solutions was for the .COM domain in the early days of the Web
- Vanity (Custom Code): 3,000 a month
- Random (Assigned by Organization): 5,00 a month
- Shared (Multiple companies use the same code): You can see this in campaigns where the call to action is, for example, “Text 43531 with #CompanyX to learn more!”. A company with a vanity number could simply use “Text 12345 with ‘More Info’ to learn more about 12345 Inc”
- Example: Mozes Mobile service for music bands. All bands share the same number “MOZES”. A person who wanted to learn about the next Sting concert would text “MOZES” with the message “String” etc.
- TextMeForBusiness.com is another company that provides this service
- Issue of “Share Code” is that if someone opts out of say MOZES because they don’t like Sting anymore, then all band members are effected.
- Always try to use different codes for different ad placements. A panelist gave an example, of how they narrowed down cup sleeves as being the most effective channel to get a person to participate. Better than print ads etc.
- Telephone companies will not give you any demographic data on who calls you SMS number, but it is fairly easy to use a reverse look-up feature to get user-specific information
- Panelists seem cautious on the idea that people will readily download an application. Besides issues with each carrier and phone, there was issues that sometimes the delivery mechanism would fail.
- Another panelist said people will download applications if they are directly useful, and offered examples of Epicurious (receipe maker) and Nascar (3 popular applications) as examples.
- The panelists also agreed that since data plans among mobile phone is small, interaction via SMS presents a greater opportunity than using application or WAP-enabled websites.
Examples of short codes in the US:
Question: On Tracking & Getting Data on Users
Question: On Downloading Mobile Applications
Question: Mobile Marketing Goals - Personalized for You, Engaging You
An attendee mentioned that as a user she saw only value in utilitarian mobile campaigns, such as British Airline’s flight information service. She didn’t see any value in ever signing up for other types of campaigns
Gene Keenan of Isobar made an important distinction that there are two types of users and campaigns: People who want something personalized for them (British Airways flight information application) and people who wanted to interact and engage (the Adidas basketball campaign)
It seemed very odd that she made that statement. All communication/information devices can either be utilitarian or interactive entertainment: Online, I can choose to either buy tickets or watch tons of useless but entertaining YouTube videos. Both are valid activities.
Question: Is the mobile space not big enough to “move the needle”?
An attend was very adamant that he did not see mobile marketing as having large potential and he felt that the case studies demonstrated the limited audience size.
Chris from Adidas and others strongly responded that while the audience size is smaller, engagement level was incredibly higher. He gave an example that 45% of people that participated in the “Basketball is a Brotherhood” campaign left an voicemail for their favorite NBA players. Additional, Chris underlined that he would prefer strong engagement with 200,000 people than “with 1.5 million people who don’t care.”
The panelist also underlined that for the 18-24 market, data has shown that 98% of mobile phone users use the phone for other than voice. SMS being key.
very interesting…
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