Coke: Bottle Films
Coke's click-to-video campaign, designed to reach consumers in more than 160 countries worldwide, was created by AdMob, a San Mateo, Calif.-based mobile advertising company. The key objective was to engage their customers on carriers and handsets worldwide, using rich content from Coke's Bottle Films, consumer-created 15 to 30-second videos of what the company calls "The Coke Side of Life." The videos can be seen at http://www.coca-cola.com/.
Coke: Bottle Films
According to AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui, discussions with other agencies and companies revealed an overall advertiser need for pages to which they could drive traffic and leverage mobile services. So AdMob decided to build a landing page tool for its advertiser customers and approached Coca-Cola about becoming a beta partner for this and a click-to-video solution.
"Coke wanted to reach customers in a controlled fashion while simultaneously testing and learning more about the effectiveness of text and banner ads in the mobile environment," Hamoui said. "Advertisers are recognizing they need a site for delivering traffic, but at this stage of the mobile internet, many of them don't have effective landing pages in place."
There were a number of technology hurdles to overcome:
- Reaching global customers on mobile devices
- Building rich xHTML mobile web pages for use as landing pages
- Delivering video to the broad range of mobile devices in use worldwide
- Tracking ad performance and video usage
A robust, self-serve landing page tool was created to handle all of the above. The tool offers a modular configuration of landing pages with a drag-and-drop mechanism, allowing advertisers or their agencies to upload images, logos or video in addition to text drafting and formatting capabilities. Advertisers can create hosted xHTML landing pages without needing to write any code.
Although a team of engineers worked for almost three months to build the platform, a single AdMob graphic designer completed the Coca-Cola landing page in just a few hours. Prior to launch, alpha testing was conducted with AdMob's video partner, MyWaves, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based mobile video company, and additional copy, creative and usability tests were performed.
MyWaves provided the video delivery capabilities, a critical component, as there are literally hundreds of handsets in the market, all with varying media capabilities, screen sizes and network connectivity. MyWaves stored, streamed and downloaded the video, all necessary click-to-video ad elements.
The Bottle Films shorts are presented to users as they browse mobile web pages. If they click on the ads, they are taken to another mobile web page that shows the first frame of the video as a still. Users can also send the video to a friend.
"No ads are pushed to the user at all," Hamoui said. "If a user clicks on an ad, he will be delivered to a mobile web page. From this page, he can choose to view the video, download it or send it to a friend."
Results thus far are promising, Hamoui said. AdMob tested the Coke ads across its worldwide network, and the ads ran in 160 countries. They also achieved a clickthrough rate of 1.37 percent.
"Perhaps most interesting was the 1.3 to 1 ratio of actions to click, meaning that the average user that clicked on the ad watched the video more than once," Hamoui said.
The demographics on mobile browser usage seem to support this. Market research from Telephia and M:Metrics show an almost equal distribution of male-to-female users and a healthy distribution across age groups.
"As on the traditional internet, banner ads enable brand advertisers to reach users on their mobile phones," Hamoui said. "Click-to-video ads should be relevant to any advertiser who has had success with video ads in other media. Direct response advertisers might also be more inclined to drive a user to a purchase action rather than a video."
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