And data from a new GE-sponsored study found that a front-end branding campaign on the service helped boost landing page traffic by nearly 28% and increased message-specific brand awareness.

GE launched an eight-day, Earth Day-focused campaign for its energy-saving light bulbs on 1-800-FREE-411 in April. Jingle Networks served more than 2.5 million ads in the time period, hitting consumers with one of three messages that focused on a single benefit for using GE's bulbs: "saving money," "good for the environment," "long lasting", or a general "Earth Day" message. Each ad also offered callers a money-saving coupon via text message.

The campaign garnered a 0.43% response rate for the text messages (173% better than the average front-end branding campaign response rate of 0.25%, according to the report.)

Meanwhile, GE commissioned The Loyalty Research Center to conduct post-campaign surveys with over 600 1-800-FREE-411 callers that were equally split between test and control groups. When it came to their reasons for using "an energy saving bulb over a regular light bulb," the exposed group gave the feature "lasts longer" higher importance ratings than the control group--indicating that at least one of GE's creative messages had impacted their consideration.

According to Anita Kirtley, manager of brand and strategic initiatives for GE Consumer and Industrial, the campaign also served as a message testing platform for their retail efforts.

"We were able to monitor the results on a daily basis and the campaign helped in getting our retail messages more focused," said Kirtley. "Traditionally our creative was about saving money--and it was interesting to see that the ads that got more coupon traction were about the planet and the environment."

While the energy-saving bulb campaign was a broad sponsorship model, Jingle Networks offers geo and vertical-specific ad targeting.

"The idea was to deliver this message as broadly as possible and gauge user interest," said Lyn Chitow Oakes, Jingle Networks' senior vice president of marketing. "But based on the success of the Earth Day promo, we're now pulling together regional-specific campaigns that will help GE target consumers based on specific stores and area codes."

At the moment, neither GOOG-411 or Live Search 411 serve ads along with the information, but given that a recent Kelsey Group study pegged local mobile search revenues to top $1.4 billion in five years (including as-supported directory assistance), it's likely that both companies will ultimately offer advertisers the option.

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