After running a cross-platform campaign on YouTube and Google?s AdMob promoting its new show, Animal Planet saw 3 million mobile in-stream overlay ads impressions with 84 percent of mobile users completing the video.

The cable television network ran the campaign for the season premiere of its ?River Monsters? series. The campaign used a mixture of rich media with YouTube, whether it was on the show?s channel, through banner ads or in-stream ads on the mobile application.

?Our overall marketing goals are always to drive ratings and buzz for a show, but within the YouTube space, our goal was to have valuable interactions with potential viewers where they don?t just receive a marketing message by engaging with multiple pieces of content,? said Victoria Lowell, senior vice president of marketing and operations for Animal Planet, New York.

Wild ads
Users could visit in-stream ads in the Android YouTube app promoting the new show.

Consumers were able to watch a preview of the show and additional videos, access the show?s mobile site and share content via social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter.

On YouTube?s Web site, users were able to interact with the brand via banner ads.

After consumers clicked on the ad they were taken to a gadget on Animal Planet?s YouTube channel.

Users could then watch an interactive video of River Monsters? host, Jeremy Wade, pop on the screen and point out highlights of the upcoming show.

?This was the first time we did a marketing shoot specifically for the digital portion of our campaign,? Ms. Lowell said.

?We started planning for River Monsters much earlier than we usually do specifically so that we could compliment the rest of our media plan with custom digital creative,? she said.

?Plus, host Jeremy Wade was completely game in having some fun with the shoot, too.?

Engaged viewers
Animal Planet and YouTube saw substantial engagement with the video and gained 2,000 new YouTube channel subscribers.

Additionally, YouTube advertising generated more than 930,000 video views on the River Monster clips.

?We saw people spend on average about four minutes with the ads, which is well above anything we?ve done before,? Ms. Lowell said.

?We have found success before within the digital space, but the engaging quality of the ad brought our results to another level,? she said.

Interactive video ads on AdMob generated six million impressions, with 75,000 users engaging with one of the interactive elements in the ad creative.

?Mobile has certainly become a growing part of our marketing plans as we learn more about how our viewers consume content outside of the TV space,? Ms. Lowell said.

?At this point in time, advertisers are in an advantageous position with the opportunity for their messaging to be on platforms that are generally not as cluttered as the more traditional platforms,? she said.