Paramount Pictures used mobile rich-media advertising as part of the multichannel campaign to promote the summer blockbuster "Shrek Forever After," which resulted in a 6.2 percent click-through rate.

The Shrek Forever After campaign targeted iPhone users on the Yahoo mobile homepage and the Yahoo Movies mobile portal from May 20-22. Yahoo?s mobile homepage gets about 50 million unique visitors a month, which comes to about 1.5 million unique visitors a day. Therefore the 6.2 percent click-through rate is quite a large number of people that interacted with the ad.

?Certainly Paramount was really happy with the work that we did with Shrek,? said Paul Cushman, senior director of mobile ad sales at Yahoo, Sunnyvale, CA. ?I think it also spoke to the endless possibilities within the mobile advertising medium.

?Paramount used strong branding and iconography and the creative execution really speaks to the creative possibilities in mobile,? he said.

Paramount, which is a subsidiary of Viacom, tapped a Yahoo rich media mobile ad unit to boost ticket sales for the movie?s crucial opening weekend.

Mediaedge:cia (MEC), a global communications planning and implementation agency, placed the Shrek mobile ad buy with Yahoo.

Campaign details
The Yahoo rich media ad unit featured animation. The ad ran on Yahoo?s mobile homepage, with the top of Shrek?s head along the bottom of the iPhone screen.

If a consumer taps on his dome, Shrek pops up to fill the screen, with ?Tickets? and ?Showtimes? icons on his forehead.

Another tap directs the user to a microsite, where they can watch the trailer or buy a ticket for a local theatre via Fandango.

On the Yahoo Movies mobile page, tapping Shrek?s head also causes it to fill the screen, where the user can tap again to move to the microsite.

Yahoo?s new ad units
This rich media unit is the first of Yahoo?s new class of interactive mobile display advertisements that leverage HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript with the goal of delivering more engaging experiences for the company?s advertisers and users.

Yahoo?s newest ad units include screen takeover, expandable and iPad tap-to-video ads.

The company first introduced the set of new mobile advertising products in conjunction with a research study that provides support for why advertisers should be present in mobile advertising.

The study data provides evidence that it is time for marketers to shift their attention and their media dollars to mobile.

Audiences are spending greater amounts of time consuming content on their connected devices, often while multitasking with other media. And, those audiences are being influenced by mobile advertising.

There is an opportunity for marketers to engage and target audiences through sophisticated mobile advertising units such as rich media.

Shrek results
Click-thru rates on the mobile Web were 30 times higher than the PC version of the same campaign.

The PC version of the rich media campaign saw a .20 percent click through, while its mobile Web counterpart saw a 6.2 percent click through.

A study by eMarketer found that the mobile platform is increasingly becoming a trusted place for advertiser-to-user conversations.

In fact 38 percent of mobile users say they are very comfortable with mobile ads and that they serve a purpose.

?The rich media landscape is an exciting one,? Mr. Cushman said. ?I think there are a couple of things of importance  and the first is that on mobile it is just one ad per page and this really allows some creative opportunities.

?The mantra of mobile advertising being a challenge because of the small size of the mobile banner is so last year,? he said.  ?Agencies need to help brands to holistically incorporate mobile into the digital marketing mix.?

Final take
Giselle Tsirulnik is senior editor of Mobile Marketer
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