WAP strategy pays off for Citroen

Client: Citroen
Agency: OMD UK
Lead planner: Sarah McBeath

Strategy
The campaign was built around the "Unmistakably German" proposition - a German car (in terms of build-quality) made in France. We used mobile in order to give the C5's "on the go" target consumers a greater depth of information on the car and on the main ad campaign. We approached the creative agency for additional interactive content to engage consumers and to enable mobile to act as a virtual C5 showroom and content platform.

Activity
We built a WAP "showroom" containing information on the C5, downloadable videos of the car, and extra content such as a quiz hosted by a character called The Baron. The site also featured a dealer locator and a Java application so prospective buyers could continue to read about the C5 offline.

The 02 and 3 portals carried video pre-rolls and companion banners, as well as rotating banners. A significant proportion of the ads were demographically targeted to reduce wastage, and we bought specific environments including sport, news and motoring sections.

Banners appeared on the Reuters website, and the Java application was served on sites such as Guardian Unlimited. In addition, we became the first brand to exclusively sponsor Vodafone's motoring section.

Results
Over four weeks, the WAP site attracted more than 85,000 clicks and a click-through rate of more than 2%, while the Vodafone sponsorship achieved a CTR of 8%.

The videos were downloaded 3,000 times, there were 1,480 dealer locator searches, and the 330,000 pre-rolls achieved brand recall of 65%, against a motoring sector average of 55%.

Most impressively, period-on-period sales for the Citroen C5 were up 63% for the year to date.

Sarah McBeath, associate communications planning director, OMD UK

This article was first published on Media Week