NEW YORK - July 28, 2009 - A mobile campaign from ChaCha, an ad-supported, conversational Q&A service for mobile phone users, dramatically increased awareness of Paramount Pictures’ Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in the week before its premiere. Measurement of the effectiveness of the campaign showed that the ChaCha ad was able to increase the percentage of people who could recall the blockbuster unprompted (unaided awareness) by an impressive 27 percentage points (176% gain over a baseline of 15.4% of people who had not seen the ad). Further, the campaign was able to increase the percentage of people who indicated they would see the movie by 10 percentage points (13% gain over a baseline of 77.3% of people who had not seen the ad).
“The ultimate goal of our campaign was to make the release of Transformers a massive event,” says Michael Rosenberg, Director, National Advertising for Paramount Pictures, a client of MEC Global. “Using ChaCha allowed us to communicate directly to entertainment fans in a timely manner. We felt a daily countdown to the Wednesday premiere of the movie using text messaging was a great way to drive unaided awareness of the big event.”
ChaCha users, who are served ads in the course of receiving answers to any question they ask, were driven to the Transformers WAP Site for story and character information, video downloads, tickets, show times, profiles and mobile alerts. According to a Mobile AdInsights advertising effectiveness study conducted by InsightExpress, ChaCha’s ads drove unaided brand awareness for Transformers in the week leading up to the movie’s June 24 release by 27 percentage points.
“While purchase intent is a hard metric to move because it involves action, not just awareness, a 10 point increase in this metric, in addition to the awareness increase is impressive,” says Joy Liuzzo, Director of Marketing & Mobile Research at InsightExpress. “In addition, ChaCha’s audience was extraordinarily engaged and eager to participate. We haven’t seen this level of engagement in a long time and it shows how powerful it can be when the right message is sent at the right time to the right audience.”
The Transformers campaign outperformed mobile norms in unaided awareness and mobile ad awareness, and matched or outperformed the norm in purchase intent according to the report from InsightExpress. Several demographic segments drove the increases:
- The teen target, which made up the majority of the sample, showed increases in unaided awareness, mobile ad awareness and purchase intent; - Slightly older respondents, age 19-24, actually responded best to the campaign with increases across all metrics; - Males 18-34 showed a huge 58 percentage point increase in mobile ad awareness; - Respondents who went to four or more movies in the last two months were most positively impacted by the ad campaign.
“The mobile generation is increasingly accessing information from their handhelds instead of desktops,” says Scott A. Jones, CEO of ChaCha. “Although the most common way to look up movie times is on the Internet, about 20 percent of respondents to the Transformers campaign reported using text message-based services instead. Heavier mobile users (65 percent of respondents, in this case) who use ChaCha several times a day are exposed to multiple messages from advertisers, which not only increases their brand awareness and purchase intent, but they also sign up for text alerts at a significant rate, demonstrating a strong new trend.”
InsightExpress (www.insightexpress.com) is a leading digital marketing research firm. Through its patented technologies, proprietary solutions, world-class expertise and time-tested research principles, InsightExpress transforms the way advertisers, agencies, publishers and researchers optimize their marketing activities. The company is headquartered in Stamford, CT, with offices in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.
ChaCha (www.chacha.com) a free mobile answers service, allows users to call 1-800-2-ChaCha or text questions to ChaCha (242242) on mobile phones and receive answers within minutes. Its unique advertising solutions provide pay-for-engagement opportunities for advertisers like Palm, IKEA, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and the Obama Campaign to precisely target and embed their messages within millions of text conversations. Unlike traditional media, ChaCha’s advertising platform is simple, results-driven and measurable. ChaCha’s mobile service now delivers over 30 million impressions each month to nearly 2 million users.
Created by serial entrepreneur Scott A. Jones in January 2008,ChaCha is funded by Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Jeff Bezos; Morton Meyerson, former President and Vice Chairman of EDS as well as Chairman and CEO of Perot Systems; Rod Canion, founding CEO of Compaq Computer; the Simon family; and Jack Gill, Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
