L'Oréal?s Garnier brand of hair and skin care products and recording-industry giant EMI Music said that mobile advertising drove 20 times the engagement levels as online ads.

Garnier and EMI tapped InvolveMobile to run a multichannel campaign featuring mobile advertising offering free mobile downloads to promote EMI artists and Garnier?s Pure Active product. The Garnier Web site and mobile ad banners informed consumers of the offer, letting Garnier customers get free access to some of their favorite songs and artists.

?The objective behind the campaign was primarily to engage the consumer audience through entertainment and to educate one-on-one about the Pure Active product,? said Roddy Campbell, Sydney, Australia-based director of new channel development at EMI Music.

?Garnier ultimately thought the best way to achieve that was with relevant music and in particular to get the demographic excited about the product through the incentive of free downloads of popular songs,? he said.

?We started off by identifying four popular artists, but ended up broadening the offering to close to 50 free download choices, including some big name artists like Coldplay and Katy Perry.?

Garnier is a mass-market brand of L'Oréal that produces hair care products, including the Fructis line, as well as skin care products, notably the newer Nutritioniste line.

The EMI Group (Electric & Musical Industries Ltd.) is a British music company.

In addition to Garnier and EMI, mobile marketing service provider InvolveMobile works with brands such as MasterCard, ESPN, News Corp., Radio One, Samsung, Journal Broadcast Group and Dawson McCallister Live, a nationally syndicated radio show in 100 markets on XM Radio.

Garnier, EMI get involved in mobile
Mobile banner ads drove consumers to a WAP site where they could download music tracks.
Consumers had to register their mobile number before they could get access and each handset was limited to one download.

More than 50 songs from 20-plus artists were available for download to mobile handsets in MP3 format, including songs from Coldplay, Katy Perry, Depeche Mode, Lily Allen, Ben Harper, Alice In Chains, Arctic Monkeys, Bat For Lashes and Bob Evans.

?In part the campaign was about testing the effectiveness of certain media channels, and the results were pretty interesting,? Mr. Campbell said.

The downloads were offered in MP3 format in parallel online and via a mobile Web site, with marketing spread across the Web, mobile, magazines, on-pack placement and SMS.

The advertising directed consumers to a landing page with product information and a click through to the downloads section.

?What was startling was that the mobile channel accounted for 95 percent of all downloads, so it was a real eye-opener in terms of channel preferences,? Mr. Campbell said.

The target demographic was consumers ages 14-24, both male and female, and primarily teenagers, as the Pure Active product is a facial treatment for blemishes and acne.

There were click-throughs from placements on various sites. However, the campaign was primarily advertised on carrier portals and publisher sites such as Yahoo.

?InvolveMobile simplified the entire process for us and made the mobile channel look much easier and more cost effective than any other channel,? Mr. Campbell said. ?Everything was pretty seamless, from data collection to serving up the content.

?InvolveMobile did a great job and enabled us to control the entire customer experience, and because the environment was centrally managed, we didn?t have to deal with individual carrier requirements,? he said. ?The main issue for the campaign became clearing copyright for the tracks.

?Obviously the results speak for themselves with mobile working a lot better than online, accounting for nearly 20 times more downloads.?

So how will EMI and Garnier use the database of opted-in mobile consumers for future marketing?

?That is currently being discussed at the moment as the database is a valuable element,? Mr. Campbell said. ?As I said, it was in part a trial for testing effectiveness and I don?t think anyone expected mobile to play such a large part in the results.?