2019 Awards Preview: Most Effective Use of Video

Ahead of our 2019 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, staged in partnership with our headline partner Dynata, and our partners DAX and TabMo, well be previewing the nominees in each category,giving you a glimpse at the high quality of entries weve seen this year. In today’s preview, we take a look at the best uses of video.


Frost Bank & Pixability: ‘Opt for Optimism’ Initiative
Frost worked with their agency, McGarrah Jessee, to create an initiative called ‘Opt for Optimism’, which aimed to inspire optimism through immersive storytelling, on-the-ground activations, a 30-day optimism challenge, and research results.

One method of storytelling was a series of long-form videos developed by McGarrah Jessee, ranging from 30 seconds to five minutes long, and sharing the stories of inspirational optimists. The goal was to find the best platforms to deliver this message to a broad audience and drive deep engagement with the content.

Working with Pixability, Frost and McGarrah Jessee chose to run the video series across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and connected TV, accessing multiple video touchpoints. Using the PixabilityONE platform, the videos were optimised toward completed views and completion quality, as measured by Oracle Moat.

YouTube exceeded Moat benchmarks by 2.5 times on completion quality for long-form video. The videos generated click through rate three times social video platform benchmarks and, when Frost added subtitles to Facebook and Instagram, the long-form video completion rate increased 2.5 times.

Home Office, Manning Gottlieb OMD, and Venatus Media: #KnifeFree
In November 2018, Venatus supported the Home Office’s #knifefree campaign to help tackle one of the Home Office’s key priorities – reducing knife crime in the UK. Young males aged between 15 and 18 were identified as the group most at risk of carrying or considering carrying knives, and this audience was found to have a passion for gaming, spending more than eight hours playing games each week.

The Home Office worked with Venatus to reach this target audience in a trusted environment, both whilst they were at home on consoles and on the move playing apps. On mobile, via EA apps, there was also the opportunity to cut-through to the target audience and increase engagement as the viewer chooses to watch the advert to receive an in-game reward.

The campaign used three different video creatives, each telling the stories of real people who have turned their lives around. The videos linked to the #knifefree website, providing access to information about the consequences of knife crime and inspiration on how to move away from it.

The targeted gaming campaign ran alongside targeted out of home, paid search, digital audio, and use of the video in shorter teaser formats on Snapchat and Instagram with a ‘swipe up’ message encouraging people to engage with the longer form assets.

The PlayStation video part of the campaign delivered 422,656 impressions with 267,065 completed views, generating a view-through rate of 62.2 per cent compared to the industry benchmark of 50 per cent.

The EA reward video part of the campaign delivered 267,796 views and 5796 clicks, exceeding benchmarks and generating a CTR of 2.2 per cent. The EA reward video received the highest view-through rate of all campaign channels at 95.9 per cent, exceeding the already high industry benchmark of 90 per cent.