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Land Rover generates test drives from mobile campaign

Ford Motor Co.'s Land Rover is leveraging touch-screen technology on mobile devices to generate test drives at dealerships.

The luxury automobile brand tapped ad agency MEC Global which, in turn, selected mobile ad network AdMob to target devices that used touch screen technology -- the BlackBerry, Treo and iPhone. The goal was to reach affluent consumers by encouraging them to tap their way to the nearest Land Rover dealership to schedule a test drive.

"With the Land Rover campaign for smartphones, we saw 12 million impressions and 3,253 actions, meaning the consumer engaged with the site somehow," said Joao Machado, online associate media director at MEC. "I believe we are the first auto company to do something like this."

The non-smartphone campaign secured more than 64,822 actions on the WAP site.

MEC created a virtual test drive for smartphones -- a video that was on the Land Rover WAP site. It showed the vehicle in an off-road demonstration.

As a geo-targeted campaign, Land Rover banner ads were placed on WAP sites such as ESPN, CBS, CBS Sports Line, AccuWeather, Weather.com, Yahoo and MSN.

All the sites worked well for the campaign, but Weather.com did the best.

The banner read, "Find Your Land Rover." Users were able to tap the banner and then type in their ZIP code. Google Maps popped up with the closest Land Rover dealerships. Users were then able to tap on a location and get directions to the dealership.

"We did a campaign in fourth-quarter with Land Rover," Mr. Machado said. "This was the third mobile campaign we did and the first two were for branding purposes. Once we saw how successful they were, we realized that mobile is a good channel for us."

MEC Global has done interactive work for Xerox, Axion, Henko, Remy Martin, Advil PM, Xbox 360, DigiFaces, Watson's, IKEA, Wilkinson Sword and Mercedes-Benz.

"We've been aggressive in the mobile space, but as an agency we are still more or less new to it," Mr. Machado said. "We know what we want, but we are still figuring mobile out. The biggest challenge in this campaign was finding the mobile WAP sites that make sense for us."