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Chevy Sonic garners 2.7pc click-through rate via mobile video ad campaign

When Chevy recently extended a guerilla marketing campaign into mobile to reach young, hip consumers and drive awareness for its Sonic brand, the automaker saw engagement rates 20 percent higher than average.

The success of the mobile campaign, which also saw a click-through rate of 2.7 percent for a video that was included, centered around the strength of the creative and the ability to target a younger demographic using ad network Jumptap?s third-party targeting. The backdrop for the ad was a mural that had been created by a street artist using a Sonic outfitted with a paint blaster.

?Having just partnered with famous street artist Jeff Soto to create Chevy Sonic?s first mural in Oakland, CA, we were thrilled when Jumptap grabbed hold of the concept and transformed Jeff?s work into mobile art,? said Matt Scarlet, advertising manager for Chevrolet, Detroit.

?It?s this type of resolve and out-of-the-box thinking we need from mobile partners to help drive our creative and keep us connected with our customers,? he said. ?The excellent results were no doubt the product of combining art and science, creative and targeting.?

Getting creative right
Chevy and its agency Carat worked with Jumptap on the campaign. Based on its success, Chevy leveraged the ad across multiple mobile ad networks and campaigns.

Jumptap pulled in the imagery from the graffiti walls to create an ad unit designed to reach a younger target audience of male and female potential car buyers who were single, educated, employed and live in urban settings.

The rich media ad unit, which was created using Celtra, included a gallery, features, dealer locator and video commercial.

The campaign began as a banner ad and expanded to a full rich media experience when users tapped on a button in the banner.

Users were presented with several different Sonic vehicles, each with a graffiti wall as the background, and could easily swipe from one image to the next and tap to find out more information or watch a video.

?Wherever the Chevy Sonic appears, the backdrop is this really cool graffiti wall, which not only ties back to their guerilla campaign but it is just kind of like a hip-looking image for the young audience they were looking to reach,? said Matt Duffy, vice president of marketing at Jumptap, Boston.

?The primary thing we did was run it across our whole network on any kind of site or app but, where we found people who fit the criteria based on our data targeting,? he said.

On target
Jumptap used its data targeting based on data it has from some of its partners to reach the target audience.

The ad was delivered across Jumptap?s network wherever it found these young people, with a focus on reaching users who engage with Words with Friends as well as the social network, music and movie areas Jumptap has.

?The best of art and science is when your targeting matches your creative and in this case, we feel like the targeting and the creative really went together,? Mr. Duffy said.

?If they had just done really hip creative but not targeted it precisely, it wouldn?t have worked,? he said. ?Conversely, if they had targeted the right people but the creative stunk, then it wouldn?t have worked.?

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