Philips? Designed to Play video campaign sees high engagement on mobile
With strong engagement rates in its first year, Philips? Designed to Play mobile campaign for its razors is being extended with a few tweaks to enhance the performance and better reach young, tech-savvy consumers with fun, interactive videos.
Campaign partners Ogilvy & Mather Duesseldorf and Rapt Media are enhancing the features and adding more videos to continue engagement. During the Designed to Play campaign?s first year, the average mobile interactive video viewing time exceeded five minutes, and developers believe the different routes continued engagement and kept viewers watching for longer periods of time.
?Mobile device usage seems to be more closely tied to leisure time,? said Erika Trautman, CEO and co-founder of Rapt Media, Denver. ?If you have a few minutes to spare, you may be more likely to pull up your phone to browse content, especially video, whereas if you are accessing content on a PC, there's a better chance you're in the office where leisure video-viewing would be less acceptable.?
Engaging through video
Rapt Media has provided custom development work for Ogilvy to enhance the second version of the campaign, including the addition of a progress bar and implementing a custom loader that features the main character pumping iron. Ogilvy has also improved the user experience and the loading time of the videos, as well as added new elements and animations including the stubble character with four new videos.
The Designed to Play campaign gives shaving tips to men while promoting its Click and Style electric razor. The video experience is available for viewing on mobile devices without users having to download an app.
The videos feature one man with six different facial hairstyles, which all are explained with different storylines. Users can click on a hairstyle to hear and watch the unique story that it represents while learning how to create the style.
Each storyline follows a different route of what the man did the night before, which gives the user to create 1,296 possible story combinations. Viewers can choose their own path, and the Web site simultaneously loads product information and styling tips accordingly.
Through this execution, Rapt Media is able to provide analytics for Ogilvy to see what content in the video is driving conversions.
?When consumers are online, they simply don't distinguish between devices,? Ms. Trautman said. ?They expect content to be available anywhere ? PCs, tablets, phones, they don't care.
?According to Google's display ad chief Neal Mohan, 90 percent of consumers start an online task on one device and finish it on another,? she said. ?So as long as consumers are spending increasing time on mobile devices, video is only going to continue to rise in importance."
The experience can be viewed at Play.philips.com.
The videos are available in four different languages throughout Europe.
The right tool
Video is a great mobile tool used to attract millennials. Budweiser is a brand often using video to grab the attention of this young audience.
Bud Light and Budweiser are among big beer brands that have poured more than $23 million into YouTube videos in the past year to engage millennials who favor craft brews, according to a report from Strike Social.
Bud Light drank up the most YouTube views for its videos - 120 million - and had 15.4 million earned views, while companion brand Budweiser achieved the highest level of engagement, 57.2 million earned views on 106 million total views. The statistics reflect how brand marketers are grasping that reaching the important millennial demographic requires engaging them on mobile and in a place close to their hearts ? YouTube (see story).
Similarly, JCPenney, Unilever and other brands are flocking to Tumblr?s video ads for an opportunity to engage with audiences in a less-promotionally oriented atmosphere than on other social networks.
Universal Pictures, The CW, Hulu and Lexus also are among brands that have autoplay video ads as sponsored posts on Tumblr, as the Yahoo-owned microblogging and social networking site eyes advertisers' swelling video budgets. The opening of video ads on Tumblr - first to this select group, then to all advertisers by mid-November - comes as video?s role in meeting the needs of today?s consumers grows in importance (see story).
When video is serving as a strong influencer, it is an obvious move for brands to leverage to seek the best engagement rates.
?Online video viewing in general has become a preferred mode of communication for entertainment and information,? Ms. Trautman said. ?Growth rates on view counts and viewing times speak for themselves.?
Final Take
Caitlyn Bohannon is an editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York
