Reader’s Digest’s digital cooking publication, Taste of Home, is fine tuning the effectiveness of advertising through mobile native ads and geo-tagging to create a more relevant experience for consumers and drive them into nearby stores.

Brands advertising on Taste of Home’s mobile site are better targeting the needs of consumers through new advertising features, which serve consumers relevant ad and product content tied to their nearby locations. Offering relative content along with purchasing locations increases the likelihood of driving sales for these brands.

“Among mobile ad formats, native ads are among the best performers,” said Rich Sutton, CRO at Reader’s Digest Association. “In a recent ANA white paper, 67 percent of agencies and clients called out native on mobile advertising as being very effective.

“The geo-tagging capabilities allow brands to reach consumers in proximity to their partner retailers,” he said.

“This gives Taste of Home another solution for brands who want to be able to drive consumers to retailers effectively. It is also a perfect use of Taste of Home content, as recipes are a great driver for multiple purchases per shopping cart.”

Native geotagging ads
Taste of Home is a digital hub for cooking lovers to discover new recipes and stay up-to-date in the food industry. The new mobile advertising platform for the publication benefits the consumer as well as Taste of Home and its brands.

For users on the Taste of Home Web mobile site interested in creating a recipe, products they might need will be offered to them through native ads and nearby locations in the consumer’s area to purchase. For instance if a reader is a viewing a recipe for pie that uses Graham Crackers in the crust and needs the product, she can simply click on the text and a personalized advertisement will pop up.

The mobile advertisement will feature various Graham Cracker products, brands and where to purchase them, based off of the consumer’s location. If she is interested in baking that pie in the near future, she has an exact location of where to buy the product, thereby driving in-store sales.

The Taste of Home Web site also features a My Savings tabs, in which users can save these products for future purchasing. When the native ad is displayed, this button is also included in the ad so as to increase the chance of a purchase.

The feature is separate from the advertising platform, but is a helfpul addition, as without it users interested in the product may lose track and forget about it. This ensures that the reader will have an organized shopping list of what the ads suggested.

Mobile advertising
Similar to this, Pinterest’s new update for sponsored pins gives brands the tools to generate higher sales by incorporating past purchasing history to serve more relevant content to consumers (see more).

Also, Dick’s Sporting Goods saw its ecommerce sales grow to nearly 15 percent of total sales in 2014’s fourth quarter as a result of the retailer’s decision to equip its sales associates with mobile devices for easy ordering in any aisle, enable geo-fencing capabilities for sending weekly ads and launch a stronger in-app loyalty platform (see more).

“Advertising that leverages trusted recipe content from a leading publication such as Taste of Home, running in its own native environment or in contextually and demographically similar environments, will provide stronger performance for participating advertisers than pure ad plays that rely only on brand messaging,” said Jason Young CEO of Crisp Media, the developer behind the advertising platform. “The addition of data-enabled geo-fencing further increases program performance by reaching consumers when the likelihood of them visiting a nearby partner store is at its highest.

“Crisp’s mobile customer activation platform, Crisp MoCA, is designed to activate customers to purchase experiences using mobile devices,” he said. “MoCA combines data-enabled targeting, powerful rich creative technology, premium inventory and analytics that will prove out program success to partner advertisers.

“Combining these key capabilities with rich, trusted content from Taste of Home will provide a powerful combination for program success for Taste of Home, Crisp and partner advertisers.”

Final take
Brielle Jaekel is editorial assistant at Mobile Commerce Daily