Stop the scroll.
That’s the goal for Timberland’s new mobile ad campaign—be so engaging and eye-catching that consumers will not scroll past it with their thumb, says Jim Davey, vice president of global marketing for the shoe brand.
The result was an ad called “coloring book” that displayed a black-and-white mural of hip-hop artist Nas that shoppers could interact with by tapping on different parts of the mural to color it in. While consumers are “coloring” in the photo, a cartoon video ad of Nas and Timberland’s new boot plays beneath the mural.
The idea behind the ad is to present something creative and innovative, like the hip-hop artist himself, Davey says. Timberland also wanted customers to associate feelings of creativity and innovation with its product. The brand, which is part of VF Corp., No. 91 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 500, used mobile ad platform PadSquad LLC for the campaign.
Timberland displayed the coloring book ad within articles on consumers’ mobile devices. The retailer targeted consumers from its customer relationship management database as well as look-alike audiences, which match the retailer’s customers with consumers of similar interests or demographics.
Timberland measured the success of the ad campaign with both engagement rate, which is calculated based on consumers who viewed and interacted with the ad, as well as the click-through rate to Foot Locker Inc. (No. 53), which is the retailer Timberland chose to use to sell this product line.
During the seven weeks the ad ran in October and November, 230,000 consumers interacted with the ad in some way, either via watching the video or coloring in the mural, which was an 8.67% engagement rate, Davey says. This is about 333% higher than PadSquad’s average engagement rate, the vendor says. Timberland has engagement rate goals similar to PadSquad’s, Davey says.
On average, consumers spent 3 seconds looking at the ad, and 45% of consumers watched the entire video ad.
“The ad performed higher than expectations,” Davey says.
The goal of the ad was to drive more shoppers into Foot Locker stores or to Footlocker.com. Timberland does not have data about whether a shopper converted on the Foot Locker website. Anecdotally, from Foot Locker’s sales associates, Timberland believes the ad drove foot traffic into stores, Davey says.
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