Microsoft is reporting results for NUads, the interactive television ad format it has been testing in North America and the U.K.
The company released engagement results around its interactive polling on Xbox Live, the first NUads experience it offered advertisers that allows viewers to interact with a video spot with hand gestures or voice commands. For example, Subway Restaurant‘s ads used an interactive poll overlaid on its video ad.
The results from the interactive polling show that on average 37% of viewers engaged with NUads when prompted with an option to vote; 71% of those then voted in the poll.
The results, which are from internal Microsoft research, are based on an average of campaigns that ran from Sept.1 to Nov. 15 in the beta phase of the program.
Subway was one of the first advertisers to try the NUads format in Canada. At the time Subway got into this form of interactive TV advertising last September, Kathleen Bell, Subway’s director of marketing, told Marketing that the format “gets people passively watching advertising up off the couch and interacting with our ads.”
Now that the company has taken part in the program for a few months, she said in a statement that it allows Subway to get real-time feedback from its audience.
Xbox Live Entertainment and Advertising general manager Ross Honey said in a release that Microsoft will be putting further investment into this new ad format, as well as video advertising in general, moving forward.
Sean Perkins, who until recently was associate director of digital technologies at OMD Canada but is now a digital consultant to Starcom MediaVest Group Canada, said he’s continually deferred advertisers to the Xbox Live environment over the past year or so as a working template to “get their heads around how to think about interactive TV” since he said most Canadian advertisers haven’t yet fully explored how to use this type of media to its full potential.
When compared to traditionally accepted “good” engagement rates of 5% to 10% in digital venues, Perkins said the aforementioned 37% reported from Microsoft proves that consumers are looking for “a means to put down the extra device and interact with a brand, all in one place.”
Perkins anticipates that, as advertisers look to further embrace the concept of a “phygital” (physical and digital) arena, more case studies like this will surface “as everyone learns from each other.”
