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ChaCha bags $20M to support MMS rich-media ad offering

Real-time answers service ChaCha has closed a $20 million round of financing from new investors VantagePoint Venture Partners and Rho Ventures to support in-MMS ad opportunities for brands.
 
ChaCha has answered nearly one billion questions in the past two years alone, having surpassed even Google in mobile text search, according to Nielsen. The company provides text-based advertising and has emerged as a place to reach the youth market for brands such as McDonald?s, Palm, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Paramount Pictures, The CW Network, NBC Universal, The U.S. Navy and AT&T.

Spending on SMS-related advertising programs alone is nearing $1 billion a year according to eMarketer. The company?s year-to-date ad sales are up 292 percent.

Mobile Marketer?s Giselle Tsirulnik interviewed Cat Enagonio, vice president of marketing and client care at ChaCha, Indianapolis, IN. Here is what she said.

What does ChaCha hope to do with the $20 million in funding?
This funding allows us to accelerate growth of our mobile and Web platforms and phone applications.

For example, we are on track to deploy a new phone application version in the very near future. This funding helps us do more - more quickly. 

This will also speed up our pursuit of international opportunities in the answers space. 

How will ChaCha be enhancing its mobile text search?
We will be providing continuous enhancements to our product quality and speed of answers, both of which have been extremely key to our success and differentiation thus far. 

For example, we have a keen focus on increasing deployment of new tools and training for our 50,000 guides to continue to improve our mobile user experience.

We will be expanding our mobile phone applications for those who have smartphones.

We will also soon be deploying our MMS mobile messaging service, which will give users the ability to see movie trailers and other relevant video clips right on their phone as they respond with interest to an offer. 

This works on over 90 percent of all phones, feature phones and smartphones alike.

Will there be better marketing and text sponsorship opportunities for brands? How will this effect brands?
Absolutely. Just this week, we deployed a significant re-launch of ChaCha.com, which has an eye on improving the benefits for advertisers and brands. 

Our new site has the ability to place brand sponsorships and ads on contextually relevant pages, making the ads better associate with the interesting content of the page and with answers our users are seeing.

We have seen how relevant info for our users on mobile increases their engagement with ChaCha and our brand advertisers, and have wrapped that back into our new Web site. 

There are fewer ads on each page now, offering brands less competition for user attention and yielding higher performance for the marketer.

Additionally, with this funding, we will be able to accelerate deployment our new MMS service that will deliver advertiser movie trailers, other video, coupon images, and rich media ads to virtually any phone. 

This allows our brand advertisers to now enhance the question and answer flow by inserting their video clips, ads and the like, onto nearly any phone. 

MMS does not require a smartphone application, so it is awesome in that it can reach over 90 percent of the mobile phones on the market.

Can you give an example of what a specific brand is doing via ChaCha advertising?
ChaCha has been successful with some of the most major brands such as McDonald?s, Palm, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Paramount Pictures, The CW Network, NBC Universal, The U.S. Navy and AT&T.

In the course of answering questions, we tease users in a friendly, clever way with phrases such as ?Find out why Halloween sucks," which was a teaser from The CW Network for the TV show The Vampire Diaries. 

This fun interaction begins a dialog between the brand and the user, and then ends with a specific call to action. 

For example, people can easily opt-in to a mobile text list for show reminders, news and updates about characters. 

A specific recent ChaCha mobile ad campaign was with a Midwestern regional theater for the premiere of the movie Eclipse. This won a 2010 MOBI award, which employed a test theater and a control theater.

The test theater used ChaCha mobile advertising for the week leading up to the premier. This test theater made $2 for every advertising dollar spent with ChaCha ? a feat unheard of using most traditional marketing methods. 

Many brands also leverage our cross-platform promotions, such as NBC Universal, which recently advertised with us across our mobile, online and social platforms to reach our millions of users to inspire interest in their Fact-Checkers Unit webisode series. 

Final take
Giselle Tsirulnik is senior editor at Mobile Marketer
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