DHL Delivers Bay Area Mobile Campaign

As part of DHL’s “Customer Service is Back in Shipping” branding campaign, Ogilvy’s Digital Innovations Group has created a series of mobile units paired with out-of-home ads. The utility-based mobile creatives are targeted to San Francisco Bay Area residents.

Oversized umbrellas providing extra weather protection on bus shelters prompt consumers to text to receive a five-day weather report from DHL on their mobile phones. This is a piece of content DHL believes is especially useful in the rapidly changing environment of San Francisco.

“The key here is we’re using a clever way of showing how DHL is always there for you,” said Maria Mandel, executive director of Ogilvy’s Digital Innovations Group.

A second piece of mobile content is a downloadable game called Stack-It. The “Tetris”-like game lets users shift DHL-labeled boxes to fill empty spaces. Bay Area residents can learn how to download the game from ads on bus shelters and taxi-cab flip seats. While the weather report is a utilitarian, the downloadable “Stack-It” uses out-of-home communication to take advantage of people’s downtime.

“The basic objective is to use breakthrough media tactics such as eye-catching out-of-home units requesting engagement. It’s all about providing utility for the consumer,” Mandel said. “With mobile marketing, the keys to the kingdom are how you can provide something for the consumer.”

The localized mobile component is part of a larger DHL branding campaign created by Ogilvy. Out-of-home media was bought by Kinetic, a unit of Mediaedge:cia.