Monday 29 December 2014

Top 10 mobile advertising campaigns of 2014

Burger King tests self-serve rich media ads
Burger King
L’Oreal, Burger King and Nissan are among the brands leading the way so far this year in taking mobile advertising strategy to the next level through enhanced targeting, greater interactivity and native experiences. 

While mobile ad budgets continue to grow, too many campaigns are simply shrunken down versions of a desktop program. However, towards the middle of 2014, there was a flurry of activity from big brands pushing the enveloped on mobile creative and tactics.

A big focus in 2014 was on moving beyond location to leverage a range of data available about consumers for more targeted strategies. Additionally, brands added uniquely mobile interactive elements and crafted impactful native experiences.

Here are the top 10 mobile advertising campaigns of the first half of 2014, in alphabetical order.

In June, Burger King began testing a way to deliver mobile coupons to consumers inside a geofence using a self-serve ad platform.

The ads promote the chain’s breakfast menu and are appearing on premium mobile sites such as Pandora. The ad unit itself exists as an overlay on top of the site or app being browsed, meaning consumers are not redirected to another site when they click on an ad.

By creating, deploying and measuring geotargeted rich media mobile ads itself instead of working with multiple vendors, Burger King is setting the stage for both a bigger commitment to mobile advertising and a pivot away from traditional banner ads.

The test is being conducted at five locations using FunMobility’s Mobile Engagement Platform, which has built-in audience targeting capabilities. It entails consumers inside a one-mile geofence receiving a coupon that can be saved to their devices.

The ads are being deployed as part of an A/B test comparing their impact against  standard banner ads using comparable creative, offers and audience targeting.

The History Channel and on-demand media streamer Netflix were a few initial experimenters to try native experience ads that appeared on publishing Web sites and took over the user’s entire screen.

The ads initially showed some success, garnering an average view time of 57 seconds. Delivered in partnership by international media and marketing solutions company Gannett and New York-based SaaS analytics company Moat, these particular ads, appearing on USAToday.com, showed the brands’ reliance on native advertising.  

When the learnings from a campaign launched last year by JetBlue revealed significant differences between smartphone and tablet users, the brand fine-tuned the next leg of the ongoing effort this spring to provide a clear differentiation between smartphone and tablet ads.

JetBlue’s “Air on the Side of Humanity” campaign uses a combination of long-form video, messaging and geofencing to tout the airline’s positioning as making traveling more enjoyable. The campaign was deployed in the Boston, New York and southern Florida markets.

The Air on the Side of Humanity campaign was singled out by Mobile Marketer last year as it was the first brand example of leveraging a voice-activated mobile ad.


In the updated version, interstitial ads were delivered inside a geofence around public transit centers. On smartphones, the ads focused more on brand consideration and less on sales in deference to how smartphones are frequently used for travel research.

On tablets, the ads featured a rich media game as these users have longer periods of time to spend interacting with content. Additionally, tablet users on Hulu and CBS viewers saw long-form video from the brand..

Beauty marketer L’Oreal Paris recently incorporated GumGum’s photo recognition technology to pick up on the hair colors of consumers in photos and personalize ads for its Ombre hair color line based on a consumer’s own hair color.

The campaign is an example of how marketers are looking for ways to personalize content on mobile in order to make it relevant for users and, hopefully, more responsive.

The campaign, which is being delivered across desktop and mobile, takes advantage of GumGum’s technology to detect the hair color of people in photos among the editorial content of its partners, such as Parade and Hollywood.com. In turn, a corresponding ad will be delivered directly to the consumer. For example, if dark hair is detected, then the technology may deliver an ad for dark hair-coloring products. 

 An in-image “Slider” unit enables all of Ombre’s color products to be included when ads appear over photos unrelated to hair. Instead of a single product being shown, the Slider tool places a number of personalized products in front of consumers and they are able to slide through the list of products.

In a stark change from McDonald’s typical flashy mobile ads that pack multiple calls-to-action and graphics into interactive ad formats, this spring the chain ran a new native ad campaign touting the origins of its coffee drinks.

The mobile ads ran within the mobile sites of publishers including Time Inc.’s Real Simple and Hearst’s Elle. With the burger chain struggling with same-store sales declines, the native strategy is an example of how the brand is trying to appeal to important younger consumers on mobile.

Younger consumers are most likely to ignore banner ads, with is why McDonald’s and other brands are increasingly looking for how meaningful ways to insert sponsored content within the flow of the editorial or entertainment content these consumers are already engaging with.

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