Brand: ChaCha Mobile Platform / Service

Executives Involved: Steve Goldstein: Chief Revenue Officer; Cat Enagonio, VP Marketing and Client Care

Brief: ChaCha’s has flourished dramatically over the past year, now ranked as number one in mobile SMS search, surpassing Google in the third quarter of 2009. We have over 16 million unique users per month across platforms and have delivered over 600 million answers to users. Our fun and extremely engaging free mobile answers service provides both users and brand marketers with a proven, highly-effective platform to meet their daily needs.

Our personalized method of mobile ‘search’ treats each of our users as an individual, injecting just the right element of human intelligence and personality, at the moment they need it. ChaCha users can literally ask anything – anytime, anywhere. An army of human “Guides” (people) awaits these questions, ready to spring into action with a quick, concise and conversational response that directly addresses the query’s natural language, serving up a level of impact and engagement that is unmatched. We get an average of 225,000 personal text “thank yous” and other versions such as “you rock!” from users per month!

Major brands are able to insert themselves into the live conversation with simple, relevant ads and other mobile services, including opt-in lists and promotions. Brands who have found success with ChaCha include some of the world’s largest and most visible such as Johnson&Johnson, P&G, Sony, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Paramount Pictures, President Obama, Palm, AT&T, Best Buy, MTV, and more.

Based on our mastery of engagement and reach, these brands have enlisted our services to engage and target specific audiences to achieve exposure, engagement, direct response, purchases and sample requests. ChaCha is able to target based on a user’s gender, location, exact birthdate/age, question or category keyword, type of phone and more.
Why has ChaCha been so successful? As with any technology, there’s a lot of industry hype now around mobile services including GPS, MMS, phone apps and other seemingly “cool” methods to reach consumers. ChaCha believes these are relevant pieces of the mobile landscape (and we can deliver advertising in these ways also). It is important to understand the reality. Less than 25% of users have smartphones today. Therefore, when these methods are used, reach is severely limited. ChaCha has opted to leverage the most commonly used and ubiquitous application on the planet – text messaging. ChaCha can interact with 99.8% of all mobile phone users. As smartphone adoption grows, we are poised to bring users and brand advertisers into that world. The results we see daily are real - and now.

ChaCha’s should win DM2’s MOBI Award for Best Network because we have a proven mobile service plaform / network that both has engages consumers in a whole new way, and also drives staggering results for brands. Our growth in the mobile market is unmatched, now surpassing Google and being referenced in numerous mobile articles, books and presentations. Consumers are inundated with countless marketing messages, few of which ever resonate, yet ChaCha’s “get through”. ChaCha is an awesome example for our industry of a truly powerful, one-of-a-kind mobile service that benefits brands and users alike.

Link to Your Creative Materials: http://akhost.chacha.com/partners.chacha.com/miscellaneous/MOBIAwards_ChaChaOverall_BestInShow_08-06-10cat.pptx