A Yahoo mobile and social campaign for the New York Stock Exchange generated click-through rates 50% greater than a standard mobile campaign, and Facebook “likes” increased by 92% and Twitter followers by 13%. Tailored creative for Yahoo Mobile users on NYSE’s Facebook page directing them to “like” the “Big Board” and NYSE’s Twitter page recommended they “follow” the “Big Board.” Creative encouraged Yahoo Mobile users to engage with the NYSE WAP site. The campaign was designed to appeal to tech-savvy venture capitalists, investment bankers, private equity professionals, and C-suite executives. With partners Media Contacts and mobile marketing agency Mobext, Yahoo executed a campaign that relied upon Yahoo’s behavioral targeting technology to serve tailored ads across two mobile destinations that are popular among this group -- Yahoo Mobile and Yahoo Mobile Finance. Creative offered straightforward, highly directed calls to action. Ads encouraged users to check out the NYSE’s WAP site where they could watch videos to hear from CEOs of recent NYSE tech IPOs. "We will consider mobile advertising in the near future," Chandra Keyser, NYSE director of global marketing and branding, tells Marketing Daily. "Strategically, the mobile ads of this campaign drove audiences to our social channels and we were pleased with the cross-platform leverage. I expect we will attempt to integrate other media channels, too." The smartphone campaign ran across Yahoo Mobile and Yahoo Mobile Finance, featuring creative that offered straightforward, highly directed calls to action. The NYSE was quick to recognize the power of social media as well as mobile when calling on its target audience to act. That’s why the Yahoo Mobile-Media Contacts solution offered one of three paths for users to engage with NYSE, each with a tailored message. These messages were rotated throughout the campaign. “One of the great things about mobile is its efficiency,” says Keyser. “And our Yahoo Mobile campaign helped us reach our target audience where they lived at scale.” The campaign ran from July through October.
It is no secret to marketers that the iPad is turning into a gaming powerhouse. Domino’s is running with the trend in a new Pizza Hero app for iPad that has users swipe, drag and tap their way to making the perfect pie that they can even order. The app uses most of the interactive features of the iPad to move the novice Domino’s chef through the process of stretching dough (circular swipes), ladling sauce (more circular swipes), scattering cheese (random taps) and laying pepperoni (targeted taps). The ambitious branded app is more than a few game-like mechanics in an ordering app. Pizza Hero ties into the iOS Game Center hub for social gaming, with a fair number of levels and challenges that make the app into a genuine gaming experience. “Heroes” competes on the Game Center leaderboard. The initial tutorials test your basic pizza-making skills, but subsequent levels offer time-specific contests that are unlocked when you complete earlier ones. As a branding exercise, the app not only gets the consumer into the process of making the better pie, but reinforces Domino’s legacy. Between levels, the game drops trivia about the company’s history and innovations. The judgmental store “manager” in the game is always reinforcing quality and uniformity. The app also allows users to create a custom pizza that can be ordered from the iPad itself. Domino’s appears to have succeeded in poking through the considerable app noise, especially among branded offerings. Pizza Hero is listed in the highly competitive Games category of the iPad App Store and has risen to the 36th-most-popular offering in the free section, which includes "Angry Bird Rio," "Family Feud" and "Snoopy’s Street Fair."
Mobile devices are moving to the top of high-tech shopping lists this holiday season, according to a new Yankee Group study. Tablets and e-readers for the first time rank in the top four consumer electronics items that people plan to purchase in the coming weeks, while mobile phones claimed the No. 3 spot. Laptops and tablets tied as the No. 1 high-tech gift, with 16% of those surveyed citing each as the device they intend to buy. This year’s rankings represent a notable shift from 2010, when e-readers and tablets were further down the list -- at No. 8 and No. 10, respectively, in shopping popularity. The percentage of people eyeing a new mobile phone also increased, from 10% to 15% in 2011. Meanwhile, HDTVs and video game consoles -- the top electronics last year -- have dropped to the bottom of the top 10 list. The recent rollout of lower-priced tablets, especially Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire, has helped spur heightened demand in the category that has been dominated the last two years by Apple’s $499 iPad. According a recent Retrevo survey, the Amazon tablet tied the iPad as the one gadget people hoped most to receive this holiday season. Barnes & Noble’s new $249 Nook Tablet offers another budget-friendly alternative to the iPad. Apart from the tablet wars, Apple is expected to enjoy strong seasonal sales for the iPhone 4S, which sold a record 4 million units in its opening weekend in October. Industry analysts expect enthusiasm for the latest iPhone model to translate into unit sales of between 26 million and 29.5 million by year’s-end. “Consumers are making space for electronics in their holiday budgets, despite economic uncertainty,” wrote Katie Lewis, associate analyst at Yankee Group, in a blog post. “With mobility devices at the top of everyone’s shopping list, makers of tablets and e-readers, mobile phones and laptop computers stand to have a good holiday season.” Growing adoption of mobile devices will also have a knock-on effect for digital content, driving more app downloads, mobile coupon use and mobile transactions. Yankee Group predicts that U.S. consumers will download more than 12 billion apps in 2012, more than a third of which will be paid. Revenue from app stores is projected to grow $6.4 billion over the next two years. A separate study this month by NPD Group found that electronics overall ranked about the same as last year among the top categories that consumers planned to shop for this holiday. It was No. 6, after clothing, toys, books, movies/DVDs and accessories, with 15% of those surveyed expecting to buy electronics products as gifts. NPD also said that 38% plan to shop online this year, up from 35% in 2010. Yankee Group found more than half (58%) of consumers expect to spend less this year on holiday shopping, while 28% expect to spend about the same amount. But smaller budgets will not necessarily erode electronics spending. “Laptops and tablets -- arguably the most expensive mobile devices -- are tied for first place, indicating consumers’ willingness to fork out cash for mobility’s sake,” stated the report. The study findings were based on data that Yankee Group collected from more than 25,000 people in its 2011 U.S. consumer survey in October, as well as on prior research the firm has conducted.
ScanBuy will support QR codes appearing on "tens of billions of Coca-Cola cups" available at 7-Eleven, Subway and other locations. The codes will promote the beverage maker's commitment to the "Save the Polar Bears" campaign, Mike Wehrs, ScanBuy CEO and president, told MediaPost. Wehrs expects the "Polar Bears" effort to experience heavy traffic to landing pages tied to the campaign. "We're expecting at least 500,000 scans, but that could easily double," he said, noting the campaign will only support scans on Apple devices. Aside from the cups, the QR codes will appear on posters. The code leads to a landing page on Facebook that allows users to throw snowballs at friends. A recent Taco Bell campaign generated 460,000 scans in three months, of which 7% of the traffic came from people without smartphones, he said. The back-end data that Coca-Cola gains from mobile QR code scans range from handset type by model and carrier to the frequency of scans by user. Wehr said the challenge of putting the QR code on a cold drink cup stresses the scanners. It's not only a curved surface, but has condensation running down the side. Anything with an irregular surface, something wrapped in cellophane or bad lighting will affect the scan. While the code will only appear on cups, the promotion will appear on a variety of things related to Coca-Cola. The campaign promoting Coca-Cola's $2 million pledge to the World Wildlife Fund's polar bear habitat conservation efforts in the Arctic will appear on 1.4 billion Coke cans in the U.S. and Canada. The cans will be white with a polar bear graphic, rather than the classic red, to raise awareness and funds for the campaign, which runs from November 2011 to February 2012.
“You bought the Harry Potter DVD? You don’t even like Harry Potter,” my wife reminds me -- because apparently I must have forgotten this fact? “Work.” She dragged me to see this movie in the theater, which according to our marital rules meant that I got the next pick. She is still talking about how much she hated “totally hated!” the dour and violent “Drive.” “Dad, what are you doing with a Harry Potter Blu-ray disc?” Even my daughter chimes in. “Even I don’t like Harry Potter.” She actually is proud of this, by the way, as am I. At the height of the Harry craze almost a decade ago, my nine-year-old wouldn’t buy in. She was about the only kid in her grade school who wasn’t expert at Hogwarts trivia and clamoring for the latest tome. I admired her independence of mind at the time, although I suspected she just got fatigued looking at some of those volumes. OK by me. In the end it saved me a lot on toy wands. In fact, no one in my family even wanted to watch again the underwhelming “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2” when I brought it home on Blu-ray. But I had to buy it. It was that or “Green Lantern.” I had limited choices when I wanted to test the new UltraViolet system of giving movie disc buyers multiplatform access to its movies. UltraViolet is a consortium of major studios and device manufacturers that tries to answer consumer demand for buying rights to a piece of content, not only to the specific medium. It uses a cloud-based locker approach to let buyers of movie disc releases access the content on the Web and on mobile devices. Buy it once, maintain perpetual, multiplatform access to the material. Alas, the dedicated mobile piece of UltraViolet is not entirely in place yet. Warner Bros-owned and popular movie guide Flixster is being used to access Harry Potter and the few UV releases on smartphone and tablet devices. There have been a number of complaints, as the support forum of Flixster can attest. Some users are finding the sign-up process confusing and others are just not getting their movies. According to some reports, Warner Bros. and Flixtser resorted to issuing some frustrated customers iTunes redemption codes so they could access the film via Apple. This last piece is painfully ironic, since Apple and Disney are the two notable holdouts from the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) alliance behind the UltraViolet project. The DECE group is a massive coalition, with everyone from Adobe to Warner Bros., Netflix, Fox, HP, Paramount, Sony, etc. Apple, which has its own ecosystem to protect, isn’t playing. Flixster CEO and co-founder Joe Greenstein tells me he is not seeing the volume of problems the reports suggest. “I definitely think reports that UV is or was not working from a technical perspective are overblown,” he says. “Not that there weren’t any glitches in the launch, but I can certainly say from hard data that the vast majority of people are successfully watching their movies across a number of devices.” He says in the first month alone “hundreds of thousands” of people have created UV accounts and successfully accessed their content. “As with any launch, there have certainly been a variety of small bugs and glitches for various users on various specific devices but we’ve been tackling those as they come up and have made a lot of progress working through most of them at this point.” The biggest complaint is from Apple users who want more direct access to their UV purchases through the Apple Store. But until Apple signs on to the DECE, Flixtser is the workaround. Users of the iOS Flixster app are supposed to be able to sign into their UV account and download or stream their lockered content via the movie guide app. Which led me to my otherwise unlikely purchase of Harry Potter – to test the process for myself. The BD disc comes with an access code for adding that particular film to your UltraViolet locker. There are hoops, however. For a Flixster user there is a double sign-up that gets confusing. I was thwarted at first until I unraveled the confusion, after a couple of tries figuring out which entity was asking me for access when. Greenstein admits he is trying to get this two-step sign-up process streamlined. I will say that once the sign-up procedure is vaulted, UV delivers on its promise probably better than you would expect from the notoriously protective Hollywood establishment. You can even add family members to a household account in UV to give multiple people access to the locker. To be sure, the pieces have been rolled out prematurely to make the holiday season. For instance, even if I log into the account from my PC or laptop, the system tells me I won’t be able to download a copy of the film to my hard drive until Dec. 20, but for now can stream through the online Flixtser account. And UV needs a mobile app of its own, which is still pending. But across both iPhone and iPad, I had no trouble steaming or downloading the full film to my devices. Synchronized streaming is still an issue. I wasn’t able to dependably drop off viewing on one device and pick up where I left off on another. Having it available in a movie guide like Flixster is fine, and surely it had been a boon to their downloads, But integrating a UV locker with my ubiquitous Netflix account, where I do the bulk of my mobile movie viewing, would be nicer. Still, UltraViolet is a step in the right direction, following the consumer into a new digital content paradigm: e buy access to properties, not to specific media. Well, if you choose the right media. “You could have gotten ‘Green Lantern’ instead?” my wife says. “I wanted to see that one.” Doh! Not that I would want to see Ryan Reynolds and those fricking abs, but you have to think about bargaining and banking chits in this marriage business, I am discovering. A really bad superhero movie flop with one of the blandest actors on the planet? Man, I could have traded having to watch that one for “Tree of Life” -- or maybe even something with subtitles.