Online video ads don’t have to be expensive, SendMe Mobile learns
SendMe Mobile had a complicated concept it wanted to explain with online video ads, but couldn’t afford the prices of traditional advertising agencies, says Kelly Beener, director of marketing. Then Beener discovered technology from start-up AddItAll that allowed her to make three video ads for under $1,000 each.
“It’s the easiest tool we’ve ever used and the fastest ad campaign we’ve been able to turn around,” Beener says.
Beener says she explained the concepts for the ads to AddItAll and they found producers to shoot the video she wanted. Then, using AddItAll technology, she was able to quickly finish the ad herself by inserting the logos, text, music and sound effects she desired. She then uploaded the ads to Google’s video ad network “and we were live,” Beener says. She says each ad cost $700 to $1,000, “10 times less than it would have cost us if we went through a traditional agency.”
The videos are designed to explain SendMe Mobile’s Solo sweepstakes that consumers can enter on their mobile phones. The sweepstakes are sponsored by consumer goods manufacturers and other companies seeking to promote their brands. A valuable prize goes to the player who enters the lowest bid that is not duplicated by another player.
In one of the video ads, two women stand outside a shop window looking at an expensive Gucci handbag. One of the women is dreaming of owning it, while the other is playing the SendMe sweepstakes on her cell phone—and then walks off with the Gucci bag on her arm.
The video ads began running online in November and Beener reports “a couple of hundred thousand impressions” in the first three weeks. “It’s a new channel, so we don’t have anything to compare it to, but when comparing it to other online campaigns it’s performing very well,” she says. She says SendMe Mobile plans to work with AddItAll on additional video ad campaigns in the first two quarters of 2008.
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