Great results from mobile marketing campaign for Dr. Parnassuss

A movie that has had some extraordinary bad luck has been seeing great results from a mobile-integrated outdoor marketing campaign. The trailer for the Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassuss saw over 200,000 downloads over the mobile channel inside three weeks, through a campaign run by Blismobile Media.

Who is Blismobile?

Blismobile is a UK mobile media company that specialises in Bluetooth and SMS marketing - although mobile web has become another channel as its popularity has grown. It markets through what it calls “Blis360″, which integrates mobile web, SMS and Bluetooth into one ad. Blismobile also has an interesting “no response, no charge” policy. What this means is that the components required to run one of their campaigns (for example the Bluetooth broadcasters that need to be deployed) are provided free of charge. The booking agency is only charged for the actual responses they get. So if no one responds to the campaign, only Blismobile is left out of pocket.

What was the campaign?

Blismobile Media ran the mobile integrated marketing for Doctor Parnassus. It was an out-of-the-home campaign that used mobile web, SMS and Bluetooth. The posters for the movie had these three mobile channels integrated into them - so that users could either point their web browsers at the mobile website, send a request for download via SMS to a shortcode, or turn on their Bluetooth and download the trailer directly. It’s a good triple whammy because it ensures that pretty much every phone from high-end smartphones all the way down to basic feature phones can access the video.

How did it work out?

Blismobile placed the printed calls-to-action in heavy commuter areas - it estimates that in the three weeks of the campaign, over 20 million commuters would have seen it. The trailer was downloaded via the various channels over 205,000 times - giving them a 1% engagement rate. Given that a good online engagement is around 0.3%, this is a pretty good figure.

Happily the film studio behind Dr. Parnassuss, Lionsgate, seems to have been hooked by the mobile channel. Ross Cunningham, Marketing Manager for Lionsgate said that “this is the first time we’ve used multiple mobile channels to support the launch of one of our films and we are very happy with the result. As part of the overall campaign, Blismobile helped us deliver a solid box office result. With 205,000 views of the trailer, mobile remains an integral element of our marketing strategy.”

What we think?

This is something that has come up several times in conversation recently. Speaking to both Jim Manis (head of the Mobile Giving Foundation) and Christian Jurinka (head of Attack! Marketing), we touched on the fact that mobile can easily be used to simply enhance already existing marketing channels. It’s one of the MOST powerful applications of mobile - it can make any object in the world “actionable” or “clickable”.