Chrysler aims at mobile effectiveness

Warc, 21 May 2014

NEW YORK: Chrysler, the automaker, has boosted its mobile marketing efforts in the last year, and is also making progress in the key area of measuring effectiveness on this channel.

Amy Peet, Chrysler's senior digital marketing manager, discussed this topic while speaking at the MMA Forum, a conference organised by the Mobile Marketing Association and held in New York.

"In the past year is really when we've started to ramp up lots of our mobile campaigns," she said. (For more, including details of an innovative campaign by Jeep, read Warc's exclusive report: How Chrysler is reaching consumers across screens.)

One issue mobile is consistently running up against, according to Peet, is that the forms of engagement on this channel, and their resultant impact on consumer behaviour, seemingly differ from desktop.

"It doesn't have the same success outcomes for us in automotive. Nobody's locating a dealer through our [mobile] ads on our website," she said.

"We're seeing a lot of 'build my own'. We're seeking high-engagement-type activities like looking at photos and viewing videos and getting into the details of the actual vehicle."

Rather than reflecting an inherent weakness of mobile as a platform, marketers may need to move away from definitions of success as used on PCs, which is a distinct context and environment.

That, in turn, will require enhancing the existing measurement options on mobile, which currently lag behind their equivalents elsewhere in the digital ecosystem.

"There's tags that we're putting on there, there's tracking that we're trying to do. Mobile is getting there, and I think that we have a couple of solutions that we're testing out to get there," said Peet.

Such difficulties feed into another obstacle facing mobile: namely, that brands possess limited resources and typically err towards allocating them to channels with clear metrics proving the payback from communications.

"Your budgets don't increase year over year but your sales targets do, so you want to maximise those dollars the best that you absolutely can," said Peet.

However, she also expressed a note of optimism for the medium's future, as measurement tools and techniques are improving rapidly.

"We're getting close and we're excited about where this is going, and I think once we can prove attribution and how those success events all ladder up to a final sale, I think you'll start to see the dollars shift a little more."

Data sourced from Warc