The effort targeted smartphone users who had frequently and recently visited  electronics stores when they were nearby one of the participating retailers. The results include a 1.03 percent click-through rate.

“They wanted to find an effective way to get the right audience into stores where the smart TV was  on display and to get people to really engage and experience it,” said David Staas, president of JiWire, San Francisco.

“That is where mobile became really critical, because it could tie together the right audience into the exact right locations and also be an opportunity to really communicate the value proposition of what was being advertised,” he said.

Qualified audience
Samsung wanted to encourage electronics enthusiasts to experience first-hand the smart TV’s voice and motion control features. After reviewing several different strategies, the company settled on mobile as the best way to be able to reach a specific audience and drive them into stores.

Samsung’s agency Starcom Worldwide developed the strategy for the campaign, which ran last fall.

Other participating retailers included Sears, BJ’s Wholesale Club and Fry’s.

JiWire used its Location Graph to build a custom audience segment that started with the standard audience of tech enthusiasts. This was then narrowed down to just those who were frequent and recent visitors at key electronics retailers such as Best Buy, Apple stores and Fry’s.

“They didn’t want to just reach anybody within 5 miles of a participating retailers – that’s a lot of wasted impressions for folks that are not a qualified audience and does not represent their customer,” Mr. Staas said.

“It is not about reaching people when they are in a Microsoft store, but it is people who have frequently and recently been in a Microsoft store,” he said. “Now we are reaching them when they are somewhere else and that was effective in driving to the folks into the store.”

Driving check-ins
Targeted consumers saw the Samsung ad when they were nearby one of the participating retailers, with the messaging encouraging them to stop in and play Angry Birds on a Samsung smart TV.

Angry Birds was chosen as a focus of the effort since this would give users a way to experience the new voice and motion controls on the smart TV.

As consumers moved into a store, the creative experience changed to encourage users to check-in on Facebook Places  or Twitter directly from the ad unit with a photo of themselves playing Angry Birds. Once they did, they were entered into a sweepstakes for a chance to win a Samsung smart TV.

Audience-first approach
The results included a 1.03 percent click-through rate, which represented a 70 percent lift and an average engagement time of 44 seconds – a 47 percent lift. The engagement rate was 1.7 times the industry average.

Additionally, 58 percent of consumers who viewed the in-ad retailer location list took the next action and viewed a specific retail location, ultimately driving foot traffic to the store.

An in-store report shows that 58 percent of customers become more positive to Samsung TV after the in-store experience.

“We are now beginning to use the idea of a geofence not so much as an audience definition but a geofence as the way to drive the type of messaging and communication, using that location as additional context to create a different dialog,” Mr. Staas said.

“Brands are really getting pretty sophisticated in understanding the new capabilities they have now buying media based on audience, identifying and reaching their specific audience segment, starting with audience first as part of a campaign strategy,” he said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York