iPhone-Specific Mobile Campaigns Rock For Land Rover, 20th Century Fox

Turns out the iPhone really is attracting the eyes of marketers - with good reason.

This week's Ad Age is reporting that a Land Rover campaign on the iPhone that enables consumers to quickly connect with the iPhone-exclusive Google Maps page has Rover marketers marveling.

Apparently, the campaign, which has been running since October, scored 400,000 impressions, with 1,100 users punching in their zip codes. "That's excellent results - that's significant," Mariana Solano, advertising-communications manager for Land Rover North America, tells the pub.

According to the pub, the campaign has also run on BlackBerries and Treos, which, combined with the iPhone has garnered 2.5 million impressions. But the click-through rate on the iPhone was 0.3% higher than the average 0.22% for the entire campaign.

AdMob + Land Rover iPhone Ad Unit from AdMob on Vimeo.

TechCrunch is reporting that AdMob, the network behind the campaign, has launched additional metrics.  According to the site, of those users who clicked on the Land Rover advertisement, 23% responded to at least one call-to-action on the landing page; 88% of those users watched the video; 9% entered their zip code to find a nearby Land Rover dealership and 3% used the click-2-call action - all of whom were catagorized as "highly qualified leads," by who is unknown. Of the 3% who clicked to call through the advertisement, 50% of the calls lasted more than 30 seconds and 20% of the calls lasted for more than a minute. I'm not completely sure what's significant about that - other than that call centers at least got the opportunity to move people to the next step in the conversion process. Actual sales figures from the campaign were not available.

Meanwhile, an iPhone campaign for 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment's DVD release of "Live Free or Die Hard" has enlivened 1 million impressions in three weeks. The campaign - which featured photos, trailers, videos and a Google Maps tie-in for directions to retailers has turned out to be "a great way to target young consumers and let them experience 'Die Hard' the way they like," says Duncan Plexico, executive director, digital marketing, for TCFHE.

So what does this all mean? Is it that iPhone users tend to be more multimedia happy early adopters? Or is that the iPhone's enviable capabilities just make these sorts of experiences so much more accessible to everyday people?

Probably a mixture of both.

On the down side, if we're only talking about .22% response rates, what will happen when everyone becomes enured to mobile marketing pitches all together?

On the plus side: Just a simple thing like capturing zip codes helps a brand like Rover boost the efficiency and effectiveness of its ad buys in other media - targeting zip codes with likely buyers (or at least, people who show interest in the automobile brand).

And more importantly, this must all be just a preview of very cool things to come in the mobile medium - iPhone or otherwise.

Read the Ad Age piece here, And read TechCrunch here.

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Rick Mathieson.com