A recent Chevrolet mobile advertising campaign that ran within the Motor Trend application had a 37 percent engagement rate, pointing to how mobile can help build brands. 

Chevrolet worked with mobile media company Zumobi to translate a six-part print advertorial for mobile and integrate the content inside the Motor Trend iPhone and Android apps. The results were strong across a variety of metrics, including an 11.2 percent click-through rate.

?One of the things that has been sorely missing on mobile advertising is a real respect for user experience,? said John SanGiovanni, vice president of product design at Zumobi, Seattle. ?Users of iPhones and Android phones have gotten good at ignoring the banner ad at the bottom of the screen.

?What we really want to do is take the same attention to detail that goes into designing a high-end app and apply to that brand placement,? he said. ?The goal is making the brand a content publisher."

App within an app
The Chevrolet Technology Series campaign also ran across Motor Trend?s print magazine and Web site, in addition to mobile. 

On mobile, it featured video and long-form content offering a view into how the Chevrolet team pioneers engineering advancements.

The goal was to create a campaign that preserved the creative elements from print and online and take it to another level by incorporating mobile into the mix. This helped Chevrolet create a cohesive brand identity, while also building a unique experience addressing the usability and content aspects for mobile.

Users of the Motor Trend app saw a Chevrolet branded loading screen and a rich media expandable banner ad encouraging them to click to see the exclusive editorial content.

Once users clicked to see the content, they were presented with an immersive app-within-an-app experience featuring custom content modules for each of six experiences that were delivered in a staggered fashion between July and October last year. The Chevy experience also included in-app navigation so users could check out all the past content that had already been unlocked.

The next chapter
Users could save the content to their home screen, where it appeared as an app.

?The ability to save to your home screen is the mobile equivalent of tearing a special section out of the magazine,? Mr. SanGiovanni said.

Results include click-through rates as high as 11.2 percent for the expandable ad unit.

Additionally, users spent as much as 6.4 minutes interacting with the ads and 6.8 percent of users saved the integrated content experience to their home screen.

?The users for these lifestyle or enthusiast apps will launch the app once a day or at least a few times a week,? said Mr. SanGiovanni. ?So a typical sponsorship buy is a drag because the consumer gets tremendous fatigue over the course of a couple of months.

?With this campaign, we were actually able to get really shockingly high engagement rates because we kept introducing new chapters of content inside the app, each one of them had representative video and long form content,? he said.

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