The predominantly under-25 audience for ChaCha is a perfect target for Hollywood marketers, which represents one of the strongest categories of return advertiser for the company. Paramount recently used the small and conversational text ads in ChaCha SMS replies to move the needle on the summer premier of the “Transformers” sequel. A countdown campaign for the film started less than a week before opening day. Whenever users send in a question, they get an SMS acknowledgement that includes a tiny text ad. In this case, ChaCha played with the messaging. “In five days revenge is coming” read one of the daily countdown messages, and in others the service said it was in the process of “transforming” the user’s question into an answer. Users were driven to the “Transformers” mobile site to get trailers and images, but the effectiveness of the ChaCha campaign also hung on the service’s persistent reminders and the conversational tone in the messaging. Users could engage in conversations and questions about “Transformers” characters and movie times.
In all 1 million impressions were served for the “Transformers” property, and according to a post-campaign report from InsightExpress, the effort paid off in a 27% lift in brand awareness and 10% lift in purchase intent. “It seems as if it had a direct impact on unaided awareness, which is a key metric,” says Mike Rosenberg, VP national advertising, Paramount Pictures. Given the success of the original “Transformers” film, “awareness was never a problem for us,” he says. “The unaided awareness and the ability to make this movie an event was the main goal, and clearly to drive last-minute knowledge the Wednesday that the movie was opening. Everyone knew it was coming, but did they know when it was coming?” He adds, “Mobile was an immediate response. We could reach them directly as a reminder.” Rosenberg sees in this success some good precedents for leveraging mobile with sequels and may use the approach next year when “Iron Man 2″ hits.
Marshall says that entertainment is a natural category for her youth-oriented demo, and these clients have been coming back for multiple campaigns. But is 1 million impressions really all that much, given the scale of the “Transformers”‘ massive multimedia push? Is a solution like this really capable of being more than a curious add-on to campaigns? Marshall argues back that ChaCha’s 2 million monthly uniques are so well concentrated in the youth demo that it rivals the under-25 slice among otherwise larger entities like RockYou and Hulu. “When you talk about eyeballs and the ability to reach this demo, we become an interesting play.”
