TVloop Blog

The challenges facing the online advertising industry have been well documented across the blogosphere as well as traditional media.  I’ve touched on the subject a few times in recent posts here and here.  Most recently, Keith Rabois, VP of Strategy and Business Development at Slide, wrote a great post at Venture Beat discussing the merits of branded apps versus advertising in existing apps.  The comments to that post quickly turned to a “engaging ads” versus “display ad” discussion which significantly understates the advertising solutions available within existing applications.  I wrote a case study post over at the FanSection Blog earlier this month about a campaign we ran for the Texas Department of Tranportation involving sponsored trivia.  We recently ran a similar campaign for Disney to promote the release of the release of the Scrubs Season 7 DVD set.  Below is a quick summary of the campaign goals, solution, and results.

Client: Disney
Campaign Date: November 2008

Challenge

• Disney’s primary goal was to create a campaign to promote the launch of the Scrubs Season 7 DVD
• Key requirement was to promote audience discussion and viral distribution of the core message
• The target demographic was primarily the age 13-34 segment

Solution

• Utilized sponsored trivia on the Addicted to Scrubs application consisting of over 600K users and 75K monthly active users
• Sponsored trivia is comprised of sponsored questions and sponsored lifelines
• Implemented fan contest where all users answering Scrubs trivia were eligible to win
• Email blast to all Addicted to Scrubs users notifying them of the launch of the Season 7 DVD and the chance to win via the contest
• Cross-promoted the Addicted to Scrubs application, the DVD, and the fan contest via applications for similar shows

Engagement Oriented Results

• The campaign was successful having met all of the strategic goals of the client
• Reached 18K unique users with the campaign
• Over 52K sponsored trivia questions answered
• Over 19K click-thrus from the email blast

Conclusion
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the key to driving engaging advertising in social media is to integrate the brand into the product so that it becomes a beneficial part of the user experience.  We accomplished that goal with the Scrubs campaign by utilizing a combination of sponsored trivia and fan contests, and the result was an engaged subscriber base and a happy client.

Addicted to Scrubs Sponsored Trivia Question

Addicted to Scrubs Sponsored Trivia Answer