Marsh Supermarkets is giving its customers a unique spin on the standard rewards-earning with a new mobile application that gifts users real money to use at the store in reward for viewing in-app ads.

This novel approach to the reward system uses one of the most powerful incentives known to humanity – free money. The approach is also an attempt to be up-front with the advertising experience for customers who know right away that they are signing up to – and will be rewarded for – watching ads.

“Marsh is excited to help our customers capture significant savings with this first-of-its-kind app,” said David Palmer, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Sales and Advertising for Marsh. “Fresh Lettuce turns our customers’ downtime into dollars they can use to spend on anything they want in our stores, no matter what is in their basket. The customers are in control of what ads they see, when they choose to see them, and how they want to spend their earned dollars in our stores.”

Fresh Lettuce
In a world where loyalty apps almost always come in different varieties of the same flavor, Marsh is taking a different approach by giving its consumers an easy, at-home way to earn rewards without a single purchase being necessary.

The new app is called Fresh Lettuce, and it rewards customers with real money that they can use to make purchases at a Marsh Supermarket all for just watching ads on their phone.

The app is linked to the customer’s Marsh loyalty account, called a Marsh Fresh Idea card. Once this account is linked to the app, consumers can begin viewing ads of their choosing, whenever they want, in exchange for rewards.

Consumers simply pick the brand that they are interested in interacting with. They are then showed a short, sometimes interactive video ad that they may choose to follow up with or not.

After they have finished with the ad, a proportional amount of money is then loaded into their Fresh Idea loyalty card automatically.

In this way, Marsh is putting the customer in charge of the ad experience, subverting the common perception of ads as intrusive and controlling.

Rather than being bombarded with unwanted ads from brands that a customer has no interest in, they now have the option to be in control of their ad experience, picking only brands they actually want to see and earning real, tangible rewards for doing so.

The rewards are real money, not limited gift cards, meaning that they can be used for any purchase from a Marsh store. Customers will not be required to only purchase from a certain category based on the card.

Loyalty app
The loyalty app process has had an almost universal approach with certain small difference for flavor.

For example, the Dunkin’ Donuts loyalty app, while popular and robust, rewards customers for purchases and that is it (see story).

Meanwhile, an app that on the surface is much different, Sears Shop Your Way system, which provides rewards from many different retailers, including services such as Uber, still functions on that same basic premise (see story).

Marsh is rejecting that paradigm in favor of a more honest and direct approach that puts the user in control of what they see and buy, without a limited set of constraints to dictate how the customer’s shopping experience proceeds.