A new Haptic Ad Service from Immersion lets marketers and advertisers create mobile video ads that pulse, vibrate and shake.

Tapping into how user’s feel

In a recent study, Immersion found that video ads with haptics resulted in a 41 percent increase in purchase intent and a 75 percent increase in ad awareness. Also, 71 percent of users agreed that haptics made the ad more appealing. 72 percent wanted to feel haptics in other mobile video ads.

“Touch effects in video create engaging and immersive mobile ads and brand experiences, which perform better on key metrics such as ad awareness, engagement and purchase intent,” said Whitaker.

Haptics in action

The US-based venture lets users develop, manage and track mobile ads that provide physical feedback through device vibration.

Examples of the technology in action include shaking a martini in an ad for Stoli vodka, feeling the engine rumble in a Peugeot ad or detecting a slight vibration when the lights flicker in a trailer for the movie “American Poltergeist.”

Making immersion a self-service

The new service gives advertisers and agencies access to Immersion’s TouchSense Design Cloud. Until now, that been exclusively an internal tech at Immersion.

“Previously, we sold an SDK to enable haptic effects, and the customer would tell us how many and what kind of effects they wanted,” said Whitaker. “Now, the creation and management has become largely self-service.” Essentially, clients can now build their own ads with the Immersion tools.

Free to try

Immersion’s Content Portal app is free and available for testing. It links to sample ads that can be run in a mobile web browser or in apps supporting HTML5, on any Android smartphone or on tablets with actuator motors.

The Content Portal app is currently Android only. According to Whitaker, currently Apple’s iOS platform is too restrictive for the ads to work but they’re working on it.