NEW YORK - Consumer electronics developer Powermat and insurance provider American Family Insurance achieved significant advances in brand awareness and other key metrics after executing mobile campaigns, according to case studies presented at the IAB Marketplace: Mobile conference.

The session titled ?Making sense of mobile metrics? took attendees through case studies, which proved the efficacy of deep brand engagement in mobile. The panelists emphasized that metrics are a vital tool to prove the effectiveness of mobile campaigns to brands.

?The power of these case studies is to prove and showcase that times are changing,? said Chris Cunningham, cofounder/CEO of appssavvy, New York. ?The lens you should be looking through is activity.?

Hans Fredericks, vice president of marketing solutions at comScore, Reston, VA, introduced the case studies.

?Like any other media, to win in mobile advertising, you have to build a large audience, collect rich data on that audience, you need to make targeting, servicing and reporting on ad campaigns easy, and demonstrate that advertising works with appropriate metrics,? Mr. Fredericks said.

He also highlighted the growth of the mobile space in the last year with a series of statistics about handheld usage in the United States, including:

? Total audience size of 234 million consumers

? 45 percent of mobile users have 3G devices (up 26 percent from a year ago)

? 21 percent have smartphones (up 68 percent from a year ago)

? 26 percent have unlimited data plans

? 21 percent of mobile subscribers are using mobile devices to access social media

Powermat
Powermat produces charging mats that can refill the batteries of mobile phones without any wires, simply by placing handsets in the proximity of the device.

The company approached appssavvy to increase awareness of its products using location-based mobile application MyTown (see story).

When consumers used the MyTown application to check in at locations for participating retailers, such as Best Buy, Bed Bath and Beyond and Target, they were able to unlock Powermat-branded virtual items.

Consumers could also learn more about Powermat and enter into a contest to win a Wireless Charging System.

?[Powermat] liked the campaign,? Mr. Cunningham said. ?They were excited by the results.

?This is three times greater than what we?ve seen with traditional ad programs,? he said.

And, what were the results?

InsightExpress, which measured metrics for the campaign, compared survey responses gathered from nearly 3,000 MyTown users, and placed them in two groups.

The analysis compared survey responses from an experimental group consisting of consumers who had interacted with the MyTown campaign against answers from a control group of MyTown users who had never seen the campaign.

The experimental group recalled positive attributes about the Powermat brand with significantly higher frequency than did the control group.

Seventy percent of experimental group members had aided awareness of Powermat, versus 25 percent of control group members.

Additionally, 74 percent of experimental group members achieved brand awareness, versus 14 percent of control group members.

Finally, 63 percent of experimental group members had purchase intent, compared to 31 percent of control group members.

InsightExpress compared the results against typical results for campaigns across various different channel categories, such as overall mobile, SMS, mobile video and traditional online campaigns.

The Powermat campaign outperformed every norm InsightExpress measured it against in terms of increases to aided awareness, ad awareness and intent to purchase.

?[This campaign] smoked any norm we could come up with,? said Joy Liuzzo, senior director of marketing and mobile research for Insight Express, Stamford, CT.

American Family Insurance
American Family Insurance approached SkyGrid, a streaming content aggregation platform available on the iPad, to create a channel to engage consumers with an interactive experience.

Since its launch in April, the SkyGrid iPad application has attracted 125,000 users, who interact with the application for an average of 5.5 hours a month.

The application works with companies such as AmFam and Audi (see story) to create branded channels with exclusive media content.

Peak usage times are Monday through Friday, in the morning and early evening, and Saturday and Sunday prior to noon.

AmFam worked with worked with advertising agency Mindshare to create an in-application environment in the SkyGrid channel that lets users interact with a virtual home to learn about safety and savings tips to keep in mind when purchasing insurance.

The campaign was designed to take advantage of the iPad?s unique features.

?Take advantage of some of the native capabilities of the iPad,? said Ali Rana, vice president of emerging media for Dynamic Logic, New York. ?It?s a very high resolution screen, so use colors that pop.

Dynamic Logic collected metrics for the campaign case study, which included the first AdIndex for iPad research.

The response rate for the survey was 10 times greater than is typical for mobile, which was already 5 to 7 times greater than online.

Dynamic Logic found that 76 percent of consumers were engaging with all the available space in the virtual home, and that 4.87 percent of consumers were interacting with multiple rooms in the home.

Average time spent in the experience was nearly 2 minutes.

Among SkyGrid customers exposed to the AmFam experience, 42 achieved aided brand awareness, compared to 35 percent in the control group.

Additionally, 8 percent of those exposed experienced mobile ad awareness, versus 1 percent in the control group.

And, 17 percent of exposed participants expressed favorable feelings towards the AmFam brand, versus 10 percent of control participants.

Finally, 20 percent of participants exposed to the virtual home express behavioral intent to follow up and purchase insurance, versus 12 percent of the control group.

?AmFam is outperforming mobile norms,? said Ali Rana, vice president of emerging media at Dynamic Logic, New York. ?If you drill down deeper in online norms, even just among insurance companies, you?re looking at the AmFam experience pushing[other campaigns] out of the water.?

The panelists agreed that the iPad platform was creating new opportunities to engage with consumers, and that campaigns like AmFam?s would continue to produce strong results.

?If you create an experience specific for platforms, which doesn?t have to be outside realm of possibility, you?ll see great returns,? said Jon Gregg, vice president of advertising at SkyGrid, Sunnyvale, CA.

 ?We?ll see these numbers going up,? Mr. Rana said. ?[This process] is about experimentation, and it?s about innovating.?