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Many verticals have embraced mobile advertising, but entertainment in particular has seen early and consistent success in tapping into the creativity and impact of the mobile environment. Discovery Channel is notable among entertainment’s mobile innovators, with standout work including the mobile rich media campaign supporting Season 4 of the popular series, Storm Chasers.

“We wanted to create a campaign that captured the excitement and spirit of Storm Chasers,” said Sal Candela, mobile director of PHD. “We knew from previous experience that Medialets could deliver a memorable and immersive campaign that met the campaign’s goals.”

Campaign goals
The mobile component was part of a broader mix designed to drive tune-in for the cable program, targeting adults 25-54 who are receptive to media content that involves sports, character-driven human-interest stories and hands-on technology fun.

Execution
Discovery Channel worked with media agency PHD. PHD enlisted Medialets to create, deliver and measure a rich media campaign that reached the target audience. PHD and Medialets had previously collaborated on a number of rich media campaigns, including the campaign for HBO’s True Blood. Mobile rich media creative was chosen to give consumers a first-person point-of-view of a storm. The creative execution initiated as banner that expanded when the user taps anywhere in app. The expansion launches a tornado that takes over the app screen, speakers and even vibrates. Then, the tornado wipes away everything in its on-screen path and cracks the iPhone screen. As the tornado fades away, the user is prompted to tap-to-watch the full screen Storm Chasers season 4 trailer. The trailer then plays inside the app to avoid disrupting the user experience.

Results
The immersive Storm Chasers creative delivered more than 5 million impressions across multiple apps. It was well received by users, generating instant buzz on Twitter and coverage in industry trades such as Mobile Marketer. The campaign was also recognized by the MOBI Awards, OMMA Awards and IAB MIXX Awards. The engagement rate for the campaign averaged 17 percent, exponentially higher than online rich media’s low, single-digit benchmarks. An Insight Express study was also conducted, giving additional insight into the campaigns success.  More than 60 percent of those exposed to the mobile campaign had a favorable opinion of Storm Chasers and would be willing to watch the program. In fact, after exposure to the mobile campaign, intent to view grew by 28 percent. Several of the brand attributes associated with Storm Chasers also grew; “is fascinating” grew 16 percent and “is a program I’m excited about” grew 19 percent.

View the full ad and learn more in the Medialets Storm Chasers creative showcase entry.

You can find this article and more in Mobile Marketer’s Classic Guide to Mobile Advertising.

Jetpacks notwithstanding, smartphones and tablets have propelled us into the future, where rich information and entertainment leap off our screens, draw us in by fingertips so deeply that we crash blindly into one another while walking down the street. For Marketers, mobile’s growth represents an exceptionally personal environment in which to connect with consumers and an exceptionally fertile ground to deliver meaningful display advertising.

So with the future — in the form of mobile devices — now literally in hand, the question for Marketers is: why attempt to engage consumers that are hooked on the deeply engaging, rich capabilities of their beloved devices with static ads?

Mobile Rich Media Gives Consumers What They Want
Smartphones and tablets unleashed new creative possibilities that engage consumers in unprecedented and memorable ways. The ability to touch, shake and spin a device adds a new dimension of interaction that device owners love to explore, while the portability of the device raises the bar for the kind of media consumers expect on the go.

For brands, this new mix of interaction and expectation opens the door to truly meaningful engagement. By incorporating rich features like video content and image galleries directly into creative ad units, brands give users more options for response. The integration of Facebook and Twitter take advantage of mobile consumers’ social media habit (Nielsen recently reported that 53% of social networkers follow brands and 40% are accessing via mobile devices) and extend the connection between consumer and brand beyond the life of the campaign. Forms for data collection, store locators, click-to-call buttons and shopping carts directly in the ad unit drive users further down the funnel, right in the ad unit.

Not only is it possible to incorporate these features directly in a rich ad served to a mobile website or app, it’s also something consumers have grown to expect from advertising that occurs within their multimedia smartphones and tablets. Mobile device capabilities have raised the bar for display advertising.

Mobile Rich Media Preserves the Integrity of User Experience
It’s not just user expectation; it’s also user experience that drives value for rich advertising in mobile, particularly when considering in-app advertising. The fact is, your target audience is engaging with the app or mobile website because they’re interested in the content or information provided–anything that disrupts that experience can undermine a brand’s investment.

Unlike static ads, rich ads allow brands to fully engage without breaking continuity of experience, enabling consumers to watch product demos, scroll through product specs, virtually drive a car and even share a brand message with their 1000 closest friends — without asking them to a new environment. The recent Polo Ralph Lauren sponsorship of The New York Times’ iPad app made it possible to access an in-depth catalog, complete with live video and an in-ad unit shopping cart without leaving the app, providing a more seamless experience that fosters a better perception of both the publisher and brand.

The ‘self-contained’ experience of mobile rich media provides another important benefit. By enabling brands to lead users all the way down the funnel to lead generation or even purchase, mobile rich media becomes a viable alternative to developing, promoting and maintaining a mobile app or mobile-optimized landing page, both of which incrementally affect the cost and effort of your ‘simple’ static ad.

Mobile Rich Media Measures and Delivers ROI.
User experience and expectation are important, but it always comes down to ROI. This is where rich mobile advertising scores big, particularly compared to static.

Mobile rich media is 100% measurable. Whether delivered to app or mobile website, every one of the compelling rich interactions that are built into a creative – be it a swipe or a tweet or a video play – can be measured to give you complete insight into the performance of your campaign. Measure the time consumers spend engaging with your creative, track the number of users who share your brand message, how many times a form was filled out, how far down the funnel your creative leads consumers.

Rich media offers more than just a click-through, it tells a comprehensive story of the ad unit’s success and provides valuable insight for your next steps.

Mobile Rich Media Doesn’t Have to Be Complex
Today, a broad range of features can be built into mobile rich media creative without breaking new ground. Expandable ads, Growable ads and Interstitials have been battle tested across smartphones and tablets. Want an interactive catalog with flappable tiles? Done. Interested in a tablet creative with multiple embedded videos? No problem. How about a 360 degree rotating product showcase or an image gallery banner with video and sharing? Easy. Best practices exist for each of these ad types. (And, in fact, they can all be created without any knowledge of code using Medialets Creative Builder.)

So while mobile will always offer fertile ground for experimentation, mobile rich media is, in fact, a spectrum from which you can choose how simple or complex you’d like to be based on what makes sense for your campaign.

Mobile Rich Media Has Evolved Quickly
In just a short period of time, mobile rich media has evolved from an opportunity fueled by cutting-edge novelty to one that offers a full spectrum of creative possibilities that meet the needs of different brands, industries and – importantly – deadlines.

Now that you can use mobile rich media to deliver seamless experiences that rise to the expectations set by the dynamic devices on which they run — without getting cut on the bleeding edge — perhaps the next person who blindly crashes into you while walking down the street will be locked into a deep and meaningful engagement with your brand.

To learn more about Medialets, contact us.

That insight has informed a range of Medialets products and capabilities that eliminate the obstacles that get in the way of large-scale rich media campaigns. Medialets’ innovations, from cross-platform in-app advertising, Medialets Muse™ and Medialets Creative Builder, to third-party rich media vendor support and real-time ad serving for mobile web inventory, together with best practices gained from unmatched experience in mobile rich media, have made it possible for us to enable the creation, delivery and measurement of thousands of mobile campaigns to more than 200 million unique devices.

It is our commitment to realizing the full value of mobile advertising for our customers that inspired us to address this next critical frontier of mobile advertising: buying and planning. To that end, following months of strategy and planning, we’re thrilled to share that today we have officially launched Medialets Private Marketplace. Medialets Private Marketplace is a fully transparent buying platform that lets advertisers directly plan, buy, execute and measure brand advertising on the world’s top mobile properties. The new platform combines our unmatched experience enabling mobile advertising with the unique insight we’ve gained into premium mobile inventory and the process by which its bought and sold.

In an industry rife with solutions targeted toward long tail and remnant media, Medialets Private Marketplace takes an entirely different approach and is uniquely and exclusively designed for premium advertising. Brands and agencies that leverage Medialets Private Marketplace find the same transparency, quality and control they expect from direct, premium media buys, while publishers benefit from the ability to precisely control what inventory is offered and sold, to whom, and at a price of their choosing. We’ve worked hard to build a model that supports and grows the important relationships between publishers and advertisers while making it meaningfully easier to execute more frequent and larger mobile and tablet campaigns.

2012 promises to be the best year yet for mobile advertising, and we’re thrilled to kick it off with the launch of this important new offering. We look forward to demonstrating how Medialets Private Marketplace can better position you to take advantage of the most valuable brand advertising medium available today.

To learn more about Medialets and Medialets Private Marketplace, contact us today.

Joe’s presentation, entitled “How to Use Cassandra As The Central Nervous System Of Distributed Systems”, discussed real-time analytics using NoSQL and distributed systems at Medialets. If you missed the December 6, 2011 conference, you can watch the Joe’s presentation below.

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In the Medialets-enabled in-ad creative, “Cold Symptom Knockdown” gives users 10 chances to throw Vicks DayQuil or NyQuil boxes at 5 moving targets, each named after cold symptoms, such as “sneezes” and “sniffles.” As the user accumulates points for each, a quarterback coach offers humorous commentary.

The creative, running in Yahoo! Fantasy Football and CBS Sports, caught the eye of Mobile Marketer. Pat Morgan, of Possible Worldwide, provided the industry publication with some insight on the campaign:

“The goal is to play the game, experience it, defeat the cold symptoms and keep NyQuil and DayQuil top of mind during the football season which is also the height of the cold and flu season,” said Pat Morgan, Cincinnati, OH-based creative director of interactive marketing agency Possible Worldwide.

“This is very topical and relevant to people who are already in the football mindset,” he said. “The game doesn’t take them out of the app experience but offers up some content that builds on their desire to interact with the NFL while educating them on what Vick’s does to alleviate a cold during the winter months.”

Check out a video of the creative in Medialets’ online showcase and read the full coverage in Mobile Marketer.

To learn more about Medialets mobile rich media ad platform, contact us.

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This document represents an important step for the mobile advertising industry because it recommends a discreet set of standard mobile ad sizes for industry to adopt.

Ad sizes for both feature phones and smart phones are listed in the document. The sizes indicated for smart phones — the type of handset devices that Medialets serves ads to — are 300×50, 320×50, and 300×250.

It should be noted that these sizes are for banner ad formats — by far the most common ad format in use today. This release of the document does not indicate standard sizes for rich media expandable ads or interstitial ad formats. In our experience thus far, sizes of those ad formats tend to be more property-specific and, in practice, can be slightly less critical to standardize compared to initial banner sizes. The SWAT team will perform more research and discussion before a set of guidelines for other ad formats is released.

The SWAT team also agreed to offer initial guidance on mobile tablet ad unit sizes. The initial guidance for tablet ad sizes contains banner sizes such as 300×250, 728×90, and 1024×90. However, tablet ad sizes are a very dynamic subject right now. The market is largely dominated by one tablet device today, but new devices are coming to market and gaining traction. The MMA will continue to offer refreshed guidance for tablet devices every six months going forward.

Members of the mobile marketing industry are encouraged to submit comments on the Universal Mobile Ad Package to the MMA. Feedback will be reviewed and will be finalized and released in January 2012.

Medialets looks forward to continuing our collaboration with the MMA and other mobile marketing industry leaders to help foster additional standardization, efficiency, and effectiveness for the mobile advertising ecosystem.