Project Overview

ALL ABOARD!.
Fairfax’s world first - the Mobile Sushi Train has been eagerly jumped on by advertisers who have used it to communicate multiple messages and offers to their audience in the small space available on a smart phone screen. This new mobile advertising unit entices users to interact and play resulting in great brand awareness and response rates five times the norm.

Organisation

Fairfax Media

Team

Fairfax Metropolitan Media:
Subash Thapa, Ian Dejong, Matt Powell, Georgina Dimsdale and Mark Dando.

Project Brief

Fairfax mobile sites attract more than 200k readers every day. We exercise due sensitivity about the proportion of space reserved above the fold for our advertisers. This is to ensure that our news content is presented in a way to satisfy the readership.

Our advertisers on the other hand, need to communicate more information about their products / offers than space available on the Smartphone screen without necessarily having to force the reader to leave the page.
We wanted to develop a new mobile advertising unit to satisfy these potentially conflicting demands while providing a great user experience for our readers.

Project Innovation / Need

More than 90% of Fairfax’s mobile readers are using a Smartphone – this allowed us to draw in some more advanced HTML5 techniques to develop this mobile advertising unit.

Inspired by the successful Digital Sushi Train concept from the web – we developed a special adaptation to suit the small Smartphone screen with navigation that responded intuitively to touch gestures like swipe and tap.

The form factor was adjusted to fit the smart phone screen leaving space for the news content that surrounds it with a detailed consideration to the size and look of slides and buttons in the Mobile Sushi Train to make them easy to use and very effective for the advertisers.

User Experience

The Mobile Sushi Train was designed to draw the reader’s eye to the slowly travelling carousel when the page first loads and to entice them to play with it using natural swiping gestures.

Working within the constraints of a small portion of the screen it offers maximum ability for advertisers to showcase multiple offers with minimum disruption to the news content that the user is reading.
This interactivity is rewarded with a very responsive ‘spin’ of the carousel showing off all the offers and messages that the advertiser wishes to communicate. The carousel loses speed and settles down quickly after contact.

Each slide in the carousel can be selected separately with a tap to invoke an individual action. These actions can include deep linking into an the advertisers site or a ‘tap to call’ directly to the advertisers call centre. Our advertisers have used this for a range of purposes from booking a hotel room to connecting with a business banker.

Project Marketing

We shared out vision for the mobile sushi train with the Commonwealth Bank back in November 2010. After intensive design, development and refinement over the Christmas holiday season we launched this together in March 2011.

Since launch we have had an influx of advertisers from Sydney, Melbourne and Perth in a range of categories eager to use the mobile sushi train as a vehicle to promote their brand and products easily across the Fairfax network of mobile sites.

The Mobile Sushi Train has been a proven success with our readers and advertisers, achieving a click through rate regularly in excess of 0.5%
Please see the examples of actual campaigns executed using the Mobile Sushi Train.