For tonight’s premiere of season four of Discovery Channel’s “Storm Chasers” reality TV series, mobile ad technology firm Medialets was enlisted by Discovery Communications to create a custom, branded, in-app ad which uses a transparent overlay – the HTML5-based creative includes a tornado that wipes away everything in its on-screen path on the iPhone screen See a video of the app in action on YouTube.
Amanda Hoppe, Media Manager at Discovery Communications, discussed her companies mobile media strategy.
In terms of digital strategies, how critical is mobile to Discovery? How do you see this evolving in the future?
AH: As an entertainment advertiser, spreading awareness and sampling of our content across as many screens as possible (i.e., mobile, TV, digital, etc.) is an important part of our strategy to drive tune-in. The proliferation of smart phones, and the subsequent opportunities to reach their users, has proved to be an exciting outlet for us to showcase the best of the Discovery brand.
What are some of the key, common goals you have for all mobile campaigns? What are the success metrics?
Spreading awareness, reminder messaging and encouraging the sampling of video content (when possible, depending on the execution) are the main goals across all of our mobile campaigns. While click-through rate to specific calls-to-action and opt ins are important, we believe that video views/completes gives a stronger indication that consumers will be more likely to tune into the show to watch more of the content that they
sampled.
By John Ebbert