U.S. Navy dives into nascent mobile video ad space

Mobile video is still very much in its infancy, but Third Screen Media claims it is reaching consumers by delivering a click-to-play wireless TV commercial.
The Boston-based mobile marketing company this week will tout its first click-to-video effort, a WAP-based campaign on behalf of the U.S. Navy. Surfers on the wireless Web are encouraged to click on a banner advertisement promoting the seafaring service, and users with video-capable handsets are treated to a WAP-based clip. Subscribers with less sophisticated phones were presented a simple banner that lead to a landing page for the U.S. Navy; others were offered a chance to download the video manually.
The click-to-video ad, which appears on a variety of wireless Internet sites and is part of a cross-platform campaign handled by advertising agency Campell-Ewald, has garnered 190,000 impressions and a click-through rate of more than 4 percent, according to Third Screen executive. Consumers who sit through the message are delivered to a landing page offering them more information about the Navy.
Interestingly, the simple banner ad resulted in a 3 percent click-through rate-roughly the industry average for wireless Web ads-while the manually downloadable ad fared worst among the three possibilities.
“In terms of the three different options, the auto-play (ad) had the highest click-through rate, and the lowest (rate) was the click-to-manual-play,” said Jeff Janer, Third Screen’s chief marketing officer. The results indicate that while users may be interested in sitting through video marketing messages on their phones, they don’t want to have to jump through a series of hoops to access the ads, Janer said.
“I think how many hurdles they have to overcome” can help determine the effectiveness of such a mobile marketing campaign, Janer said. “That’s a definite factor. But by the same token, (an advertiser) could see a lift of half a percent with auto-play.”
Other mainstream brands are slowly experimenting with video as well, using brief clips to build name recognition or welcome users to their wireless services. AirG, a Canadian startup specializing in user-generated content and wireless communities, features interstitial ads between video clips. And CBS Sportsline delivers a video greeting to users who sign up to receive text message alerts about their favorite teams.
But if mobile marketing is still in its infancy, using video to target wireless users is effectively in utero. Creating video content for the wireless platform can be costly and time-consuming, and the number of users with video-enabled phones remains a fraction of the overall mobile market.
“The full potential of mobile advertising is still a little way off, primarily because of the restricted audience size,” eMarketer understatedly claimed last year. “However, this will change quickly, and eMarketer projects that the number of 3G phone users who watch video worldwide will exceed 500 million by 2009. Even the more specialized audience within this group, those who watch broadcast TV on their phones, will grow to more than 100 million by 2009.”
And in the United States, at least, the lack of carrier interoperability for multimedia messaging service content remains a major snag for advertisers looking to pursue video. While the tier one operators generally can handle simple applications like photo-messaging-allowing users from one carrier to exchange pictures with subscribers on other networks-there is no universal standard for delivering video messages across carriers. So advertisers must use banner ads, links and other techniques to draw users to WAP sites before delivering their video marketing content.
While such difficulties may be hindering today’s mobile video marketing efforts, they also allow advertisers to stand out by delivering TV-like commercials on mobile phones. The sheer novelty of such content may be enough to grab consumers’ attention and make an impression on wireless users. For now, though, the number of advertisers aggressively marketing through wireless video-and the number of consumers tuning in-will remain just a fraction of the overall mobile market.
“For us, this is a first,” Janer said of the U.S. Navy mobile video campaign. “On one hand, everybody’s excited about video. On the other hand, it’s not really ready for primetime.”