NEW YORK – A Campbell Soup Co. executive at the 2014 MMA Forum said that a mobile advertising campaign from last year that targeted consumers who had previously bought Pace salsa is now being tested by several other brands.

Executives from Campbell Soup and Catalina discussed a pilot program that Pace salsa ran last year that targeted consumers who had previously bought products in the past during the “Connecting Offline Behavior to Mobile Advertising” session. Additionally, data about grocery shoppers and mobile was presented during the session.

“I think with this program, we’ve started to solve for what that clear understanding looked like [and] really building out what the measurement looks like, what the takeaway looks like and then building in insights that we can take back to those teams and understand how they can build and optimize programs moving forward,” said Zach Barkus, manager of mobile and emerging media at The Campbell Soup Co., Camden, NJ.

“As we built this out into other brands, we now have I’ll say three or four other brands that have taken this pilot and build it out,” he said. “Going into 2015, we have continued to leverage this, we’re leveraging it with out shopper teams specific to retail partners and looking even closer at what geofencing and location can do to make that algorithm and approach even more robust.”

Kicking up mobile
Campbell’s mobile advertising campaign was meant to help retain lapsed purchasers in specific areas. The effort lasted two months and was a launch partner.

Key performance indicators included impressions, percent lift and sales lift (see story).

Per Ms. Barkus, the digital maturity of Campbell’s brands varies dramatically, and Pace has traditionally not done much in digital before the campaign with Catalina last year.

The campaign also targeted a group of consumers in a region of the country that was in decline for several quarters.

The key learning from this campaign was that the experience was not optimized for a mobile device and did not include a strong call-to-action.

However, the performance of the campaign was strong, largely because it was an awareness campaign, per Ms. Barkus.

The brands that are now testing similar programs that use mobile sites and different calls-to-action.

“Anytime we can dive into a specific scenario and play it out, it often times allows us to build that across the portfolio to show us exactly what the insights were, exactly what we learned and how we can build it into a strategy going forward,” Mr. Barkus said.

Breaking down demographics
Interestingly, Catalina’s research indicates that targeting by demographic may not be as effective on mobile that marketers think.

Instead, past purchase history shows a shopper’s buying habits that can be measured in-store.

This is particularly true for CPG brands that use mass-marketing techniques to reach a small group of consumers.

Per Catalina’s research, 64 percent of television ad spend is focused on two percent of a particular brand’s revenue.

Additionally, 15 percent of exposures reach households that represent 80 percent of a brand’s sales.

Catalina also looked at 32 million shoppers at 10,000 stores in a one-year period to examine how consumers pick brands.

Per the research, consumers ignore a whopping 99.9 percent of products in-store, meaning that once a consumer walks into a store they already know exactly what they are looking for.

“For the net, people are really missing their audiences using demographic-based targeting,” said John Caron, vice president of marketing at Catalina, St. Petersburg, FL. “What’s interesting even more is that it gets even more compelling once you walk into the store.”

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York