As a global sponsor of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, Visa wanted a multi-screen approach to promote their tie in with the event.

This included sponsorship of Yahoo's No. 1 Olympic site on the PC as well as the coverage of the Games on Yahoo Mobile, the No. 1 mobile site in the United States, according to M:Metrics.

"Visa created banners driving users to a site it created specifically for the Olympics," said David Katz, vice president of mobile advertising and publisher services at Yahoo, Sunnyvale, CA. "The landing page was fairly interactive and gave users the opportunity to get to know the players better through anecdotes about the athletes."

Ultimately, the goal of the campaign was to drive traffic to Visa's mobile site at http://visa.mobi/goworld and engage users with a rich mobile experience through background stories on featured athletes.

Visa's sponsorship was successful on many levels.

"Sponsorship placements throughout the site combined with Visa's Beijing 2008 Olympic Games specific banners created a highly relevant experience for users," Mr. Katz said.

Yahoo Mobile's audience response was positive demonstrated by an above average click-through rate, which Visa will not reveal.

This campaign was all about brand building," Mr. Katz said. "The goal was to have users interact with the brand.

"Visa's landing page experience worked really well with our coverage of the Olympics," he said. "That worked better that just an independent Visa brand message."

One of the challenges on mobile is getting reach on large audiences.

The Olympics is a blockbuster event and it gave that reach.

Visa was targeting a broad audience.

Visa is not the first big brand to achieve its goals in a mobile campaign with the help of Yahoo.

Another example of a leading brand using mobile as a medium to reach consumers is Jaguar.

Jaguar came to Yahoo in November for help in driving awareness of the new 2009 Jaguar XF car. This was Jaguar's first mobile campaign nationwide.

In conjunction with the 2009 Jaguar XF's reveal at the LA Auto Show, Jaguar wanted to drive qualified traffic to the XF mobile Web site to engage consumers in the XF experience and capture handraisers.

Yahoo's reach was able to generate instant awareness. Yahoo's targeting products allowed Jaguar to pinpoint in-market shoppers for luxury vehicles. Finally, Yahoo's audience on the Jaguar mobile site was said to be highly engaged and took more than 56,000 actions.

Among those actions these visitors took on the Jaguar mobile site were looking at photos, videos and contacting dealers. This generated 2,400 qualified leads.

Continuing the November effort, Jaguar North America teamed up with Yahoo as a key advertiser throughout the duration of the 2008 NCAA Men's Final Four Tournament.

"The Olympics is a mass market event," Mr. Katz said. "We brought them that engagement.

"Also I think that the fact that Visa rotated its creative played a role in the success of the campaign a well," he said.