Dairy Queen hired mobile marketing agency Mobile Posse to create a campaign for it’s “Sweet Deals” value menu back in March. Releasing some details of the campaign, Mobile Posse reports that the response to the idle-screen campaign so far has been an impressive click-through-rate of 22%
Idle-screen advertising is the practice of displaying full-screen banner ads on a mobile device screen when the device is not in use. It’s an opt-in service, and counts as probably one of the least invasive forms of mobile advertising yet developed. Mobile Posse offers coupons and discounts to subscribers, along with weather forecasts, news and trivia.
For the Dairy Queen campaign, Mobile Posse displayed the Sweet Deals ad at 5pm in the evening, offering meal deals of 3 and 5 dollars. Mobile Posse claims the CTR averaged more than 22% – some of which came from the Recent Offers Menu that allows subscribers to scroll back through deals that have appeared on the idle-screen in the past.
From the release:
“We are always testing new ways to effectively connect consumers with client brands, and mobile is a tremendous opportunity,” said Nicole Newville, Director of Modern Media at space150, who oversees the Dairy Queen account. “Idle screen advertising proved both effective and economical, and an ideal mobile complement to traditional marketing programs. We are excited by the impressive results of our initial campaigns enabled by Mobile Posse.”
“We are very excited to be working with Dairy Queen and space150 to drive awareness of the Sweet Deals value menu,” said Jon Jackson, CEO of Mobile Posse. “The success of their campaign proves that idle screen delivery is very effective at creating brand awareness among consumers and at driving those consumers to take action.”
What we think?
I’ve always been a fan of idle-screen advertising, and I think this shows how effective it can be. Possibly my favourite thing about it is that it’s not constrained to smartphones – I’ve seen Celltick demonstrations of very effective idle-screen ads on much smaller screen Nokias. I reckon one of the reasons this campaign was so successful was because they chose their time well. Sending the ad when people would just be starting to think about dinner is a great idea.
But if the average click-through is 30% (as in the later story) – doesn’t that mean it was actually below-average performance?
The average mobile CTR is 3% compared with online which is less than 1%
A recent white paper published by Tetherball discusses ways to measure how the effectiveness of mobile marketing, even when customers do not perform the desired action step immediately. The resource is available at http://www.tetherball360.com/analytics/.