Pepsi Mobile Advertising Campaign huge click through rates very early on

by: Bena Roberts Monday, October 20th, 2008

Really positive news on mobile advertising coming out from Polar Mobile and Pepsi.

What?

Pepsi’s ad campaign running on The Hockey News Mobile, an application for BlackBerry
developed by Polar Mobile, has already reached 100,000 impressions and 1,000 click-throughs in just 4
days since its launch.

What was the incentive in the advertising campaign?
The mobile initiative targeting hockey fans is part of a bigger campaign with the National Hockey
League. Consumers are given the opportunity to score a trip for four to the three biggest NHL events of
the year, plus $500 in spending money.

From the press release:
“Advertising on The Hockey News Mobile was a perfect fit for Pepsi, given the nature of the campaign,”
said Gaurav Jain, Vice President of Business Development at Polar Mobile. “The users can click on the ad
to get a promotional email that fully describes the contest and allows them to register online,” he said.
With a history of more than 60 years, The Hockey News is North America’s No.1 selling hockey
publication with 2 million-plus readers. Hockey fans receive The Hockey News’ latest stories, blogs,
features and columns, including close-ups of their favorite stars and teams, opinions and analysis, team-
by-team coverage and full-color action shots, directly on their BlackBerry smartphone.

“We customized the campaign for mobile and Polar did the creative and worked with the agency to
create the banners,” Mr. Jain said. “We suggested three different creatives because our experience has
taught us that campaigns with a variety of banners tend to get better click-through rates,” he said.
When a user clicks the banner, a pop-up box appears asking whether the person wants an email
explaining the details of the contest. Users do not have to type in their email. The application already
knows it so users can just click to get the email sent. The email is sent immediately and the user can act
on it right away.

What we think?
OK – I like this because its relevant. The 500 incentive and the target market and the closed focus (is Hockey huge?). I have to say, I know that a lot of Indian’s like Hockey but is it is huge?

OK – I just did a search for Hockey Canada and I know the answer to that question now. Canadian’s love hockey and this is a Canadian news story.

So – I believe the click through – I believe the excitement – this campaign sounds like its hitting all the sweet spots.

2 Responses to “Pepsi Mobile Advertising Campaign huge click through rates very early on”

Michael Said:

Well… I’m a Canadian (albeit, a transplanted Dane)… and Hockey enthusiasm here is about the same as football to Europeans (hockey not so big in the US, but still quite significant). The issue is that the mobile web is pretty young here (I’m doing all i can to change that). Data rates have been pretty spendy here, and connection speeds have been slow. The iphone release helped a lot (connectivity speeds and data rates). It’s encouraging to see the “known entities” using mobile as a platform.

Comment made on October 21st, 2008 at 2:05 am

OMD Said:

Got some additional info that OMD http://www.omd.com also helped and participated in this campaign with mobile banner creatives. Bena

Comment made on October 22nd, 2008 at 7:44 am