Digital advertising firm AdTheorent and ad agency Proof Advertising have released the results of their “Travel Texas FY 2019” mobile advertising campaign. The goal of the campaign was to drive engagement across Millennial and Gen X audiences to encourage them to visit Texas.

AdTheorent’s Studio A\T created two custom, 360-degree rich media gyrosphere units – one for each target audiences – to highlight passion points for each audience and entice travellers to learn more about Travel Texas. Users can navigate within the 360-degree view between different activities by either swiping or moving their device to access videos, a gallery and other materials.

To identify the target audience of people interested in activities taking place in Texas and to inform targeting, AdTheorent used its Audience Builder tool. This leveraged live-poll ad units to identify a deterministic audience of engaged hand-raisers who said they were interested in visiting Texas.

In this case, AdTheorent polled individuals about Texas activities with the following question: What type of Texas trip excites you? There were four optional answers: Outdoor; Food & Drink; Arts & Culture; and Shopping.

AdTheorent used the attributes and characteristics of responding consumers to build a Predictive Audience, after which its machine learning platform identified the consumers within that audience who were most likely to convert, leading to smarter optimizations and better performance results.

The campaign delivered a 25 per cent arrival lift based on ad exposure to non-Texans; a 2:1 return on ad spend based solely on tracked hotel revenue; and a 38 per cent conversion rate based on visiting key pages of TravelTexas.com

Additionally, one of the key goals for the 360-degree mobile creative was to garner rich media engagement. The 360-degree video unit encouraged very high in-unit engagement rates, with a large volume of actions related to the gyroscope functionality, suggesting interest. Overall, engagement rate was 22 per cent.

“Whether you’re an adventurer, antiquer, foodie or historian, Texas is a destination for everyone, and compellingly highlighting the range of activities in our advertising efforts is a crucial part of generating mindshare among our target audiences,” said Ly Tran, associate partner at Proof Advertising. “The combination of the beautiful 360-degree video ad units, AdTheorent’s unique ability to deterministically identify audiences interested in traveling to Texas, and use of machine learning to identify those with the highest likelihood of visiting, has been an extremely effective approach for us, and we are thrilled with the results of this campaign.”