Paramount Pictures ran a mobile search campaign to increase awareness around the movie premiere of "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen."

The mobile campaign from ChaCha, an ad-supported, conversational questions and answers service for mobile phone users, helped Paramount increase awareness of the film in the week before its premiere. Measurement of the effectiveness of the campaign showed that the ChaCha ad was able to increase the percentage of people who could recall the blockbuster, unprompted by an impressive 27 percentage points.

"Paramount was trying to make a big splash for the release of its movie," said Susan Marshall, vice president of marketing at ChaCha, Carmel, IN. "Using ChaCha allowed Paramount to communicate directly to entertainment fans."

ChaCha users, who are served ads in the course of receiving answers to any question they ask, were driven to the Transformers WAP Site for story and character information, video downloads, tickets, show times, profiles and mobile alerts.

The campaign was able to increase the percentage of people who indicated they would see the movie by 10 percentage points.

According to a Mobile AdInsights advertising effectiveness study conducted by InsightExpress, ChaCha's ads drove unaided brand awareness for Transformers in the week leading up to the movie's June 24 release by 27 percentage points.

The Transformers campaign outperformed mobile norms in unaided awareness and mobile ad awareness and matched or outperformed the norm in purchase intent according to the report from InsightExpress.

Several demographic segments drove the increases. For example, the teen target, which made up the majority of the sample, showed increases in unaided awareness, mobile ad awareness and purchase intent.

Additionally, slightly older respondents, ages 19-24, actually responded best to the campaign with increases across all metrics.

Males ages 18-34 showed a huge 58 percentage point increase in mobile ad awareness.

Respondents who went to four or more movies in the last two months were most positively impacted by the ad campaign.

Paramount was able to target consumers that asked ChaCha entertainment-related questions.

"Consumers that asked questions that were considered in the entertainment category were targeted in this campaign," Ms. Marshall said. "But Paramount was interested in our overall user base as well.

"We have really grown a lot in a short amount of time and it seems that our demographic was a perfect fit for Paramount's target audience," she said. "If you talk to Paramount, they will say mobile offers an intimate and immediate channel, more so than other marketing mediums.

"The channel helps engage consumers and drive them to a WAP site, like in this situation."