Leading up to the game’s release, Activision wanted to build buzz and drive pre-orders, and to do this, they created a multifaceted campaign that gave consumers a variety of options to engage with the creative.

One important element around building buzz was driving social media activity, so Activision created an ad unit that let consumers tweet at the Call of Duty Twitter handle, directly from the ad.

To drive pre-orders, Activision came up with an innovative two-pronged approach. For users who wanted to order the game directly from their device, the unit contained a “pre-order” button that linked to the game page on Amazon.com. For consumers who wanted to order the game in person, the ad also featured a store locator, which used a map to highlight all the nearby stores selling MWF 3.

Finally—to complete the mobile experience, Activision also included a full video trailer that consumers could both watch and share on social media channels.

Here is a second video showing the trailer and store locator in action:

As Millennial Media Creative Week comes to a close, we’ve had fun highlighting some of the great brands succeeding in mobile creativity. Advertisers are harnessing the power of engaging mobile creatives, and we can’t wait to see what the future holds.

The campaign was for the “Patagonia Music Collective,” which is a charitable initiative Patagonia undertook with top musical artists to raise money for environmental groups.  The specific campaign goals were to drive app downloads and direct sales of Patagonia music songs.

Mobile video allowed Patagonia to immediately grab the attention of the consumer, and provided them a creative way to highlight a participating artist and showcase a musical sample.

Here is a video of the unit in action:

During the ad experience, Patagonia overlayed two unique buttons on top of the video that allowed consumers to engage with the ad.

Patagonia had over 15 different choices of buttons that they could potentially use to further engagement and action.  Of these, they selected a “Buy” button, where consumers could go directly to iTunes to purchase music, and a “Download” button, where consumers could download the official Patagonia music app. After consumers clicked on either button and engaged with the ad, they were taken back into the video experience.

We have had other advertisers use our Interactive Video product to achieve completely different objectives, such as Buick, who ran an awareness campaign and overlayed “Share” and “Learn More” buttons.

To learn more about the Patagonia or Buick video campaigns, visit www.millennialmedia.com/brands.

Westin used mobile as a creative way to extend their digital “Elements of Well Being” campaign, and give consumers a new environment to interact with images of comfort and relaxation that convey the Westin brand.

When designing their mobile experience, Westin uniquely increased engagement by creating two rich media ads that encouraged consumers to physically interact with their mobile device.

One of the rich media ads in the campaign was a “shakable unit” that allowed consumers to interact with the ad by moving their phone side to side. Each time a consumer shook the phone, the frame would advance, and the creative would dynamically change to display a different “element”, such as Westin’s SuperFoodsRx menu.

The second rich media unit contained a screen full of balloons, which users could “pop” by touching.  When every balloon was popped, an image was revealed of a woman lying on a bed of balloons, symbolizing a good night’s sleep in Westin’s Heavenly® Bed—one of the “Elements of Well Being.”

Finally—Westin also recognized the importance of highlighting a strong call to action, and the creative included a complimentary night offer, and let users click to call Westin reservations directly or book via a mobile landing page.

Below is a video of both rich media ad units, and you can view the full Campaign Summary at www.millennialmedia.com/brands.

The changing mobile landscape has provided unique opportunities for financial brands to reach and engage consumers, and in the last year, the number of mobile finance users who own a smartphone has increased 55 percent.  These users have also shown key behavioral characteristics, such as how 48 percent consider themselves “risk takers,” as opposed to only 35 percent of the overall mobile audience.

The Mobile Intel Series: Finance guide also highlights what finance brands are doing on our global platform and features information to help brands strategically think about how they are approaching consumers in the space.

Here are some additional highlights from the guide:

• Finance has numerous sub-categories, and the largest is insurance, with a 42 percent share of the total spend. Banking was second, and financial services and credit cards were 3rd and 4th.
• Mobile banking was the finance sub-category accessed most frequently by consumers. 35 percent accessed banking content once a week, and 22 percent accessed it almost every day.
• 80 percent of mobile finance users own a Smartphone—an increase of 55 percent year-over-year. 37 percent of mobile finance users own a non-phone connected device (tablet, e-reader, MP3 player, etc.).
• Mobile finance users tend to be young and wealthy. The number of mobile finance users between 18-34 is almost double the overall mobile average, and mobile finance users over-index in the 75k+ and 100k+ income brackets.
• Almost 50 percent of mobile finance users claim they will stick with a brand they like.
• Lead Generation/Registration was by far the most popular campaign goal for finance advertisers, making up 70 percent of all campaigns.

Click here to download the full free guide and past editions of the Mobile Intel Series.

All insights are based on our own platform observations, along with a research study we commissioned with comScore.

For an in-person briefing on the data for your brand or client, contact us at research@millennialmedia.com.

If you have any questions or ideas for future reports, feel free to send them our way.

This week we’ll be spotlighting campaigns from www.millennialmedia.com/brands, and today, we’re happy to start with a recent campaign from Starz, promoting the premiere of their hit show Spartacus.

Starz had the Millennial Media team build a custom HTML5 ad unit that leveraged our “Media Gallery” functionality to highlight a collection of characters from the show.  Consumers could swipe the unit side-to-side to rotate between different characters, and for each viewable character, consumers could access unique bio information.

To further consumer engagement with the unit, Starz gave users the ability to watch a trailer from inside the ad, visit the Spartacus site, or share the trailer via social media channels.

Here is the unit in action:

Check back in with us tomorrow for Day 2 of Creative Week and another innovative example.

This week, we rolled out another update to mMedia, which includes an Impression Forecaster and Bid Price Estimator—an algorithm that provides advertisers suggestions on where to set their minimum bid price. With the new feature, our mobile technology can instantly analyze potential impressions at a specific bid price, and alert advertisers how likely their campaign is to deliver.

mMedia gives users a variety of different options to manage their mobile advertising efforts, ranging from the ability to control daily budget, to features like our Hyper-Local targeting tool, where an advertiser can draw a border around a location on a map, and only serve ads within this specific area.

Conversion tracking and the ability to target Wi-Fi connected devices and specific carriers, grouped by country, are some of the other additional features.

For more information, or to utilize mMedia, watch the video below or visit www.mmedia.com.

To do this, we partnered with the IAB to commission a Harris survey, and then married that with consumer data from our own platform.

According to the Harris survey, 79 percent of NCAA Tournament fans used their smartphones and tablets to follow the tournament, and for respondents between the ages of 18-24, an astounding 91 percent used their device to stay connected, play-by-play.

Here are some other highlights from the Mobile Madness data:

• On the first day of the NCAA Tournament, impressions on sports apps on the Millennial Media platform increased 31 percent week-over-week. From 5-7pm ET that day, impressions increased 158 percent.
• 16 percent of consumers used their smartphone as their primary device for following the NCAA tournament as compared to the 17 percent that claimed the PC as their primary device.
• 69 percent of consumers watching the NCAA tournament on TV used their mobile device while watching.

Stats on how consumers used mobile during the tournament:

• 48 percent – checking scores
• 25 percent – reading about teams/players
• 23 percent – checking brackets
• 20 percent – watching highlights

This was an interesting precursor to other upcoming events like the Olympics, and was a demonstration of the role that mobile now plays in important cultural moments.

Click here to download the free full report.

We also partnered with the IAB to create a NCAA Tournament infographic, and that can be downloaded here.

If you have any questions or suggestions for future reports, please send them our way.

m-Commerce and Foot Traffic
In order to drive additional, immediate sales, Activision and their agency, MEC, utilized mCommerce capabilities, including a “button” that directly linked consumers to the Modern Warfare page on the Amazon mobile site to pre-order the game. Once released, the ad unit was updated with a store locator, which included a map, address and contact information; enabling consumers to enter their postcode to find all nearby game stores where the game was available.

Finally—for a game that had the buzz and anticipation of Modern Warfare 3, it was important for Activision and MEC to include a social media element that allowed users to share their excitement. From within the creative, consumers could share the rich media trailer through social media, or send a tweet to the official Call of Duty handle.

Alex Hicks, the Activation Manager at MEC, summed up the campaign by saying:

“Modern Warfare 3 was the most talked about entertainment release of 2011 and the multi-faceted nature of the campaign allowed us to hit all our objectives. Not only did the mobile campaign drive strong consumer awareness across a key touch point, but it helped fuel fan engagement across all major social media platforms.”

For a look at the campaign in action, here are two videos we created that demonstrate the user path for each ad unit:

On behalf of the Millennial Media EMEA team, I want to say congratulations to Activision and MEC on a successful campaign. To view more details, check out our campaign summary page at http://www.millennialmedia.com/advertise/campaign-successes/

With this anniversary edition of S.M.A.R.T. ™ we decided to take a year-over-year look at key global advertiser trends in 2011, such as advertiser campaign goals, and what post-click actions brands are implementing in their campaigns.

We also took a look at what verticals are spending in mobile, and found that nine verticals experienced triple digit growth year-over-year, led by Technology which grew 698 percent.

Here are some other highlights from the Year in Review S.M.A.R.T.™ report:

• Finance was the leading global vertical on our platform (ranked by spend) and grew 314 percent year-over-year.
• Sustained In-Market Presence was the leading campaign goal in 2011 and made up over 30 percent of all campaigns. Driving lead generation/registrations was the second leading goal.
• 24 percent of all campaigns in 2011 had a “watch video” post click action. 31 percent of campaigns enabled consumers to place a call, and 32 percent let them download an app.
• Gaming was the top overall app category in 2011 (replacing Music & Entertainment, which was on top in 2010), and grew 16 percent year-over-year.

Click here to download the free full report including campaign highlights from leading brands like Westin, and the top global advertising trends for North America, EMEA and Southeast Asia.

Our recent Year in Review Mobile Mix report can be downloaded here.

If you have any questions or suggestions for future reports, please send them our way.

The IAB worked with Advertiser Perceptions to develop a customer feedback survey that, in their words, would “identify the sales organizations and individuals who are viewed by the ad buying community as achieving the highest standards of sales excellence.” The survey was completed by approximately 400 agency and marketing decision makers across the entire digital landscape.

In terms of being knowledgeable about the space—we have always prided ourselves on our Mobile Intelligence reports, and educating both our clients and the market on the real-time consumer and advertising trends we see on our platform. We have now released over 60 reports (over almost 3 years), and our S.M.A.R.T ™ and Mobile Mix ™ reports are valuable tools for marketers looking to stay up to date on the fast moving mobile industry.

For innovation and creativity, our hard working product team has brought numerous new mobile ad innovations to the market, which our sales team can in turn present to our clients and work on personalizing for their brand. Whether this is the Mobile Circular, Interactive Video or the App Engagement Program, we are always looking for creative new ways for our partners to leverage mobile.

Finally—for customer service, all I can say is that I’m extremely proud of the effort our team puts into working with our advertising partners. Our team is focused on doing whatever it takes to move the needle for our clients, and it’s certainly an honor to be recognized for this.

Congrats to the Millennial team, and to all our brand/agency partners, we look forward to helping you continue to succeed in mobile!