The Weather Channel Interactive's "Mobile Month" promotion yielded 28 percent higher mobile Web traffic during the mobile-centered campaign, breaking records for the site.

TWCi's Mobile Month promotion, which lasted through the month of June, was designed to promote the use of The Weather Channel's mobile products as a resource for forecasts and lifestyle information via the mobile Web and downloadable applications. The month-long promotion featured a "BlackBerry A Day" giveaway which yielded almost 650,000 sweepstakes entries.

Off-portal mobile page views reached a record high of 62 percent during the promotion and online opt-ins to receive a link to the mobile Web site on the user's mobile phone jumped 150 percent from that of the regular year.

Mobile Marketer's Jordan Crook interviewed Derek Van Nostran, director of marketing at The Weather Channel Interactive, Atlanta.

Here is what he had to say:

What was the overall strategy of the campaign for Mobile Month?
Mobile Month was an integrated initiative, working with consumers, distributors, internal relations, ad sales marketing and public relations to blanket TWC platforms and create a presence in the marketplace with a consistent, coordinated message about TWC Mobile products. Inventory on weather.com, TWCN, TWC Mobile and NBCU Digital was used to cross-promote the offer and drive traffic to the weather.com mobile site.

What were the various calls-to-action associated with the campaign? How did the mobile Web fit into the overall strategy of the multichannel campaign?
Consumers were invited to enter for a chance to win a BlackBerry a day from both weather.com online and weather.com's mobile Web site. Via PC, they were directed to a landing page to enter their e-mail address and offered a bonus entry if they proceeded to enter via the mobile Web site. The promotional messaging across platforms was designed with the primary call to action to participate via the mobile Web site.

How many unique visitors does the Weather Channel get to its mobile Web site monthly? Is traffic growing consistently?
Our mobile Web site reaches more than 12 million unique visitors each month. Traffic has been great -- page views and use of the site has increased, and between our mobile Web and ad-supported download applications, our reach is growing. For the month of the promotion, we had our highest average daily page views on record.

On which NBCU digital properties did the ads appear? Were any of them mobile?
It was run of network promotion including MSNBC.com, NBC.com, iVillage and more -- we were not on any NBCU mobile sites this year.

Why is mobile a good platform to promote the Weather Channel?
Mobile has been a great extension of how consumers already know us from TV and the Internet. Weather is such a natural fit for mobile content because it is both location specific and is constantly changing. Consumers are affected by weather every day in many different situations, and the utility of having weather on-the-go with accurate forecasts for your specific location is critical in planning daily activities.

Where do you see mobile taking us in the future?
The growth of mobile content has only been helped by multiple app store launches, with existing providers expanding their content and new providers joining the mobile space. This is all good news for the consumer. The mobile industry is learning a lot, and there are many exciting opportunities ahead in helping shape how weather is viewed on mobile, how we can better serve our consumers, and the opportunities available for mobile advertising.