Iron Man 2 mobile video ad gets 26,000 views in 10 days

Three UK and Paramount Pictures have picked up 26,000 views for an Iron Man 2 trailer on mobile devices. The deal between the two companies placed the video ad in the new on-portal application from Three UK, Favourites. It has averaged 2,600 views per days since launch.

What’s the story?

This deal was brokered by mobile marketing firm YOC. Three UK recently started embedding a new application called Favourites on all of its UK handsets. This app appears on the device home screen, and allows one-click access to the users favourite mobile services, including Facebook, Skype and YouTube.

Paramount Pictures bought branding space on the Favourites screen, with a clickable link through to an Iron Man 2 mobile landing page – which included a video trailer. Today, results from the campaign have been released:

• 86,412 Three UK users clicked The Iron Man link
• The video was played 26,000 times

According to Neil Andrews, Head of Media Sales and Content Services at Three UK the Favourites app was the most succesful part of the Iron Man 2 campaign. He said “the Paramount team wanted to drive trailer views in their target demographic for the release of Iron Man 2. Favourites provided the reach and targeting they needed to get results.

This isn’t the last campaign of its kind panned by Three UK and YOC – they’re currently working with Walkers and BBC Radio 1.

What we think?

This story is more about the changing attitudes of mobile owners than it is about the success of mobile advertising. Mobile landing pages with embedded videos have been possible for a long time now, they just never got very many impressions from users. This was because people were justifiably nervous of clicking links like that. Not only would a video take ages to load, you’d probably get smacked with a hefty mobile charge for it – and it would look crap on the tiny screen. The proliferation of smartphones and the current tendency of operators to offer reasonable data plans is finally feeding back into rich-media mobile advertising.