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San Antonio targets travelers with interactive selfie campaign and 67pc engage

The San Antonio Convention & Visitors Bureau is running a rich media mobile ad this summer that enables consumers to experience the city through an interactive selfie feature and, midway through the campaign, 67 percent have taken a secondary action. 

The convention bureau teamed up with AdTheorent and Proof Advertising to create a rich media unit that flows from an initial banner and opens into a full-page showing a video of attractions. Viewers are also encouraged to snap a selfie or tap through to visit the San Antonio Web site. 

?The creative execution for the ?Be a Part of the Scene? rich media mobile advertising campaign is unique, highly engaging and immersive,? said Anthony Iacovone, CEO of AdTheorent. ?The ?selfie? feature, combined with the way the rich media unit enabled users to visualize themselves in different San Antonio locations, provided a fun experience for users.  

?The rich media unit?s pre-populated social messages, as well as functionality which enabled seamless editing and sharing/saving of customized ?selfies,? afforded users many ways to interact with the unit, and that drove engagement,? he said. 

San Antonio selfie
The campaign, which is running all summer to drive awareness about San Antonio and encourage travelers to visit, features two calls to action on the rich media full page: ?Snap your San Antonio Selfie? and ?visit SanAntonio.com.?

When viewers tap the selfie button, they are able to take a photo or use a pre-existing photo to be inserted into one of four unique scenes. Three of the scenes are San Antonio attractions while the fourth is humorous dinosaur head image. 

Users are also able to share their customized San Antonio-themed selfies on social media using either pre-populated Facebook and Twitter messages or by creating their own copy. 


Users can also save the images to their device library.

The primary goal for the campaign is to drive secondary actions and engagement within the ad unit, including travel intent actions as well as social sharing.  

AdTheorent uses its predictive targeting capabilities with the goal of targeting users predisposed to take secondary actions.  

Travel planning
At the campaign?s mid point, the company claims the click through rate is 60 percent higher than industry average while secondary engagement is as 67 percent, which AdTheorent states is approximately six times the industry average of 11.5 percent. Of the users who took a secondary action within the unit, 7 percent completed the final step of sharing socially or saving the selfie images that the user created within the rich media unit. 

In addition to the selfie engagement actions, users are taking actions that signal travel planning and research, yielding a 3.86 percent ?intent to travel? conversion rate. These actions include visiting the ?browse and book? page on the VisitSanAntonio.com site, requesting leisure guides, mobile app conversions and clicking on the ?go? button, which is done after inputting travel dates. 


Additionally, consumers from Houston to New York are spending an average of 102 seconds engaging with rich media unit, compared to an industry average of 13.2 seconds, per AdTheorent.    

?The success of the campaign stems from the combination of engaging, highly-immersive creative and data-driven predictive targeting with an emphasis on secondary engagement KPIs,? Mr. Iacovone said. ?The primary goal of the campaign was to achieve secondary engagement within the ad unit so the unit was conceived to keep users immersed in the experience.  

?Equally important to the campaign?s success was using predictive modeling to locate target users and then optimizing models to focus on users most likely to engage in the desired secondary actions,? he said. ?AdTheorent?s data mining platform was thus able to predictively target and deliver users most likely to engage.?

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