How 3 brands and 1 mobile ad company are changing mobile video ads

Independent mobile advertising platform AdColony teamed up with three Unilever brands to run interactive mobile video campaigns in what the company claims to be a regional first.

The Unilever brands included Sunsilk, Brooke Bond and Jif, which used the Aurora HD interactive video ads.

This format also gives advertisers the opportunity to measure attention of the users since they are engaging with the ad while it is playing.

After running three separate campaigns with different executions, AdColony found that 43 percent of people who viewed an ad engaged with it actively, easily surpassing industry benchmarks and performing over 7X better than the AdColony platform average.

Not only did nearly 50 percent of all people that saw an ad engage with it, but most consumers would touch, tap or swipe the ad multiple times, and the total number of engagements per person was over 50X industry averages reported in the Global Video Benchmarks Report from Innovid. Engaging with the video also led to increased post-video activity, and in one campaign, the Aurora™ HD Video led to 3X increases in user acquisition for the company’s loyalty program and 2X more click-throughs to the site, when compared to a standard video campaign. The Aurora™ HD Video campaigns also drove a 90 percent viewable completion rate, which is over 3X the industry averages reported by Moat.

“We are proud to work with partners like Unilever in the region to help drive awareness, engagement and purchase intent in new and exciting ways on mobile devices,” says Samantha Billingham, Regional Sales Director at AdColony EMEA. “Leveraging the power of creativity and interactive capabilities of our Aurora HD Video technology, these brands created wonderfully immersive experiences that engaged their consumers and delivered powerful results.”

Beyond engagement metrics, Aurora™ HD Video also drove lifts across key brand metrics. A third party study with Research Now found that Aurora™ HD Video resulted in a nearly three percent delta lift in purchase intent, which is 3X the average digital campaign lift. The campaigns also drove an increase of over seven percent in brand favorability –above the digital benchmark of 0.10 percent delta lift – and brand familiarity was boosted by a delta of 1.79 percent –beating the digital benchmark of 0.20 percent delta lift.

AdColony worked directly with all three brands and their agencies on creating custom concepts, which allowed a range of activities from dragging a slide, tapping a character or color on the screen, to wiping away dust and debris to better reveal the video in front of them.

“Our mobile campaign allowed us to take what had already been a successful TV spot and incorporate a level of interactivity that allowed people to engage with our brand in an entirely new way,” adds Billingham. “The campaign provided measurable results that we are very pleased with, ranging from clicks to loyalty program sign-ups. It has been a great indicator of the impact building a unique creative experience can produce.”