Fox?s Gotham mobile video ads see 8x lift in engagement
People and Entertainment Weekly magazines hosted mobile-centric video ads to promote Fox?s TV show Gotham and saw a lift in engagement 8 times higher than traditional desktop campaigns.
The campaign ran for three days during annual event Comic-Con and utilized advertising platform Celtra to create the rich media experience, which bypassed the iOS native player and auto-streamed the video in-line with editorial content. Serving as less of a disruption than typical redirecting video ads, the campaign video garnered 5 million plays and more than 300,000 minutes of consumption.
?Working with Celtra, Fox and Fox's agency Mediastorm, we developed a Web-based campaign that promoted the Fox-Tv series Gotham to smartphone, tablet and desktop users alike,? said Derek Gatts, associate director of ad operations at Time Inc., New York. ?The campaign performed very strongly with Entertainment Weekly's and People's core audiences.
?It encompassed a focus on entertainment, and it took advantage of the timeliness around Comic-Con. This audience is passionate about entertainment and celebrities, so it was a natural fit for the two.
?Not only did the campaign perform extraordinarily well across device types, it also managed to give the Fox brand a major increase in user engagement by providing a robust experience across all platforms.?
Growing engagement
While the iOS platform only allows auto play video ads in apps, not on the mobile Web, these video ads often caused deterrence and possibly frustration from users. Celtra?s embedded video player allowed users to scroll through editorial content and be met with the video, which was placed in stream and played automatically.
Celtra?s mobile ad platform has shown success this year and continues to grow. Its recent quarterly report shows even more conversion in Q2 since Q1.
Given that users spent more time interacting with the ad content, Celtra?s smart video ad formats garnered an average of 25.4 seconds time spent on the ad unit, while the average time spent on standard ads doubled to 16.5 seconds in Q2, which was 8.2 seconds in Q1.
Celtra has found that the ad expansion rate for standard ad formats increased significantly in Q2, from 0.51 percent to 0.61 percent. Smart video ad formats were even more successful with the expansion rate leveling at 0.73 percent. The best performing vertical was technology, which yielded an ad expansion rate of 0.79 percent.
The ad engagement rate saw overall increase and while standard ad formats grew to 13.5 percent from an average of 10 percent for the last few quarters. Smart video ad formats delivered a 24.7 percent ad unit engagement rate.
Celtra found that entertainment and CPG ads generated the highest engagement rates by vertical.
Time Inc. first tested this technology of Celtra?s with Fox?s Gotham and plans to continue to use the platform for future campaigns.
Attracting an audience
This summer, broadcasting company Fox readied fans for the premiere of Gotham with an interactive contest involving the movie trailer and mobile application SendUs.
Marketers within the entertainment industry hoped to keep the consumer?s ongoing attention through adding an interactive experience on mobile for smartphone users. Through these efforts, networks can use the power of user-generated content as brainpower for their own future initiatives (see story).
Combining multiple parts of entertainment, such as the Time Inc. publications, Comic-Con and Fox TV, Celtra?s platform was able to reach a united audience between the three sources.
"Being a high-end, premium publisher, Time Inc. needed a way to provide high-quality ad products across their inventory,? said Matevz Klanjsek, co-founder and chief product officer at Celtra, Inc., San Francisco. ?They turned to Celtra's AdCreator platform to create a cross-screen, video-centric display advertising campaign that would simultaneously run across smartphone, tablet and desktop devices.
?Video ads are an important channel for entertainment brands to reach and engage their audiences and the combination of the right publisher context, the right ad product and well-executed creative delivered exceptional performance across key campaign metrics. High view ability rates proved the quality of Time Inc. premium inventory and high video completion rates validated the overall campaign strategy.?
Final Take
Caitlyn Bohannon is an editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York
