Mobile campaign drives the promotion of Jaguar's XF model

By Giselle Abramovich

May 7, 2008

Jaguar pounches with mobile video ads

When Jaguar Cars tapped interactive agency Global Beach for a campaign to promote the XF model, the automaker never even imagined the results that the mobile channel would generate.

Since its launch in November to coincide with the Jaguar XF unveiling at the Los Angeles motor show, the campaign has delivered more than 15 million ad impressions, delivering 85,000-plus unique visitors to the Jaguar XF WAP site. 

“The strategy of the campaign was to deliver a new experience to Jaguar owners and prospects,” said Beth Bilock, account manager at Global Beach, Irvine, CA.

“We were trying to capture a mobile audience and determined that having a mobile WAP site was an interesting way to do that," he said. "We have this audience and we want to cater to it.”

The XF mobile ad campaign appears on mobile Internet sites including MSN.mobi, cars.mobi, Yahoo Mobile and AdMob.com.

Overall, the campaign saw a click-through rate of 0.6 percent from the mobile banner ads used to promote the WAP site.

The site at www.jaguarxf.mobi provides a gallery of clear images to push the car’s design, innovation and performance, including high- and low-resolution versions of XF videos.

The site lets visitors enter their ZIP code to locate their nearest dealer and book a test drive or to order a brochure. Visitors can also submit their email address to request a branded email newsletter and can download wallpapers to their handsets.

Since the campaign launch, there have been more than 12,000 videos and more than 16,000 wallpapers downloaded. For users who visited beyond the homepage, the average time spent on the site was 2 minutes and 12 seconds.

Additionally, 1.2 percent of users requested an email brochure by entering their email address and 2.6 percent located their nearest dealer to arrange a test drive.

“With everyone’s attention for different types of viewership, we wanted to get that active person on-the-go,” Ms. Bilock said.

“With the mobile market being a new and interesting media to get into, we see that this is one of the most unique and interesting ways to forge away with and capture our audience," she said. "Additionally, we are one of the first among competitors to do this.”

The Jaguar WAP site uses detection software to ensure the content served to visitors’ mobile browsers is dynamically optimized for each handset.

As a result, the service automatically resizes the site for viewing on iPhones, smartphones, BlackBerrys, PDAs and more than 2,000 other mobile devices in use nationwide.

The campaign was large enough to warrant a dedicated iPhone mobile Internet site, despite the views of some who claim regular Web sites look good enough for the small screen of an iPhone.

“Overall, the campaign did extremely well,” Ms. Bilock said. “It broke all records in terms of expectations and we will be working on another WAP site centered on the new XK.”