Mobile marketing campaign success from The North Face

The North Face mobile shopping marketing

The company hasn’t missed the lesson from their experience and is now in the midst of a strategic digital shift.

The first large mobile marketing push from The North Face was strikingly successful as the company experienced a higher rate of digital engagement in Europe as a result of this campaign.

Now, the brand is shifting itself away from its older traditional channels and toward smartphones and tablets.

To accomplish this goal, The North Face has partnered with Millennial Media. It was this arrangement that brought about the brand’s first European advertising campaign geared specifically toward smartphone and tablet users. This was launched ahead of the winter holiday season under the name “Mountains are Calling”. Its ad saw considerable engagement rates as its local websites rose by 9.5 percent in Germany and 8.5 percent in Italy.

This move was the first of what they knew would be a new direction in mobile marketing away from traditional channels.


To create this campaign, the North Face used the Video Plus ad unit from Millennial Media. This provides a full-screen interactive video that appears between the publisher content and the app. The outcome that they were able to achieve was over 319,000 competed views in Germany and over 114,000 completed views in Italy. Furthermore, among the viewers who did watch the video, 29 percent watched it a second time, even though they were provided with the option to skip it after the first 7.5 seconds had passed.

According to The North Face, the campaign’s results demonstrated the power of marketing over smartphones and tablets, even within niche markets. They are already well on their way into the development of their next campaign, which will be called “Longer Days Are Back”, which they will be launching in The United Kingdom and Europe in March 2014.

When discussing the “The Mountains are Calling” mobile marketing campaign, the junior digital marketing manager at The North Face, Alessander Argenti, said that the success of that campaign “signaled an important shift in our approach to mobile and digital marketing, which is being applied to the UK and other European markets.”

Leave a Comment


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.