With Facebook engagements increasingly happening on mobile, Lexus recently leveraged the social network?s newsfeed to drive awareness for two new vehicles using live streaming video.

Lexus introduced the 2014 IS and IS F Sport cars at last month?s North American International Auto Show, with Facebook fans able to view the introduction live from the newsfeed on their mobile devices. The effort also included a teaser ad to make users aware of the upcoming event.

?They were looking to maximize the value of the earned media that they had built up on Facebook to date,? said Marcus Whitney, chief technology officer at Moontoast, Boston.

?They knew that they could really activate a lot of awareness and engagement around this new car reveal by leveraging the newsfeed because that really is the vehicle where you can best reach people on mobile devices,? he said.

Lexus worked with its agency, Team One, to develop the campaign and leveraged the Moontoast platform to launch the social rich media ads.

Counting down
Brands are looking for ways to leverage Facebook?s large audience and recognize that engagement is increasingly happening on mobile devices.

With the newsfeed the best way to reach mobile Facebook users, brands are exploring how to deliver a premium experience in the newsfeed that can drive awareness.

The Lexus campaign on Facebook consisted of three phases.

In the first phase, Lexus used a countdown rich media ad unit with a teaser video to build anticipation for the live streaming event. The ad unit let users know about the upcoming event and that Facebook was the channel to catch the unveiling happening live.

With the Moontoast platform, users engaging with the Facebook newsfeed from their mobile phone see a post from a brand such as Lexus and when they click on it, the Moontoast rich media app takes over the screen but the user is still in the Facebook app.

Full-screen experiences
The second Lexus ad unit was the actual live streaming video. Again, once users clicked on the unit, the experience expanded to fill the entire screen and users could watch the unveiling of the new Lexus vehicles live from the auto show.

The third ad unit was a follow-up featuring details about the car.

Throughout, users were able to share their information with Lexus to get more information and to let the brand know what they thought about the car.

The campaign delivered 100,000 views for the live stream with additional downstream views.

Lexus? previous efforts to generate awareness using Facebook did not use the newsfeed, which meant that mobile users were left out of the equation.

?We know that this significantly outperformed any campaign that they?ve done in the past on Facebook with respect to the number of views that they got and certainly the ability to reach fans on mobile devices was a key component of that,? Mr. Whitney said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York