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Oreo mobile ad units drive double the interaction rate compared to banners

An Oreo cookie marketing campaign delivered almost twice the user interaction with mobile ad units that focused on swiping, tapping and scrolling compared to standard mobile banner ads, according to a new study from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

The in-market study shows how ad units that enable brand marketers to tell bigger, bolder stories on small mobile screens can drive better results. In addition to driving higher interaction rates, such ad units also produced higher brand and message recall for the Oreo campaign.

?Marketers must look beyond the standard mobile banner ad because it?s a non-optimized advertising experience that fails to deliver an innovative experience that has positive impact from a branding perspective,? said Cella Irvine, CEO at Vibrant Media, New York.

?Above all else, brand marketers must consider crafting campaigns that leverage ad experiences that deliver interactivity and creativity at scale,? she said. ?That should be top-of-mind for any brand marketer when trying to engage a user in today?s multiscreen world. ?

The in-market study of the Oreo Cookie vs. Creme marketing campaign was conducted in partnership with Vibrant Media and comScore.

Effective use of mobile
While mobile advertising doubled in one year to reach $3.4 billion in 2012, marketers are still learning how to use the medium most effectively. With this in mind, IAB undertook an examination of how six interactive mobile ad units compared to standard banner ads in terms of driving results for the Oreo campaign.

Mobile marketers faces several challenges that derive from the relatively small screens of smartphones. These include grabbing and holding the attention of mobile users and delivering rich creative ad experiences that inspire interaction. Another challenge is proving that mobile is working.

To conduct the test, mobile users viewed mock content that contained either one of the interactive mobile ad units, a standard mobile banner ad or that had no ad. Users were then asked to complete a short brand lift survey on their mobile device.

The ad units studied were an Adhesion Banner, Push, Slider, Full Page Flex, Filmstrip and Full Page Flex with in-text overlay.

Driving user interaction
The interactive ad units break down into two main forms: A full page unit and a banner-to-full-page experience. The latter includes the adhesion, slider and pull ad units that invites users to interact with a full page creative while letting them stay in control.

Upon interaction, the full page unit comes into a screen as part of the same experience so users do not have to go to a different site or landing page. The interactions take place on the page.

There is also a close button that takes users right back to the content that they were looking at before interacting with the ad.

The results show that the rising star ads generated nearly twice the interaction rate of mobile standard banner ads, with consumers 79 percent more likely to interact with one of these ad units than with a standard mobile banner ad. That is to say, 9.3 percent interacted with one of the more interactive ad units compared with 5.2 percent who interacted with a standard mobile banner ad.

Users also responded to these ads about nine seconds faster than they did to banner ads.

Positive perceptions
Additionally, users interacting with these ad units were 18 percent more likely to recall the brand and 23 percent more likely to recall the brand message compared with a banner ad.

When it comes to recall, 98.1 percent of those who interacted with rising star ads recalled the brand name advertised and 81 percent recalled the brand message.

For standard mobile banner ads, 83 percent recalled the brand name advertised and 66 percent recalled the brand message.

These ad units also lead to more positive user perceptions of mobile ads, with users 43 percent more likely to say ads are attention grabbing, 38 percent more likely to say they are enjoyable and 22 percent more likely to say they are better than other mobile ads.

?Our desire is for these forms of invitation banner to become well known, eliminating any "what happens when I interact here" tension too often present in other forms of advertising,? said Peter Minnium, head of brand initiatives at IAB, New York.

?We are not likely to see a world where all inventory is full-page ads delivered interstitially,? he said. ?For this reason, the industry needs effective standards for banner-to-fll-page experiences in addition to a consistent standard for the full page.?

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York