Mondelez Sees Results From Mobile Futures Program

DEERFIELD, Ill. – Mondelez International Inc. is analyzing initial results from its Mobile Futures program, a year after it launched the eight pilot programs between snack brands and startups, according to a Mobile Marketer report. The program, created as part of the company's spinoff from Kraft Foods, sheds light on what is and isn't working in mobile for consumer-packaged goods brands.

"I think there are two phenomenon in the extension of phase one [of Mobile Futures,]" company spokeswoman Valerie Moens told the news outlet. The first is that more brands are working with more startup partners. "The other thing is taking the learnings from the pilots that happened last year to try and scale them at the national level."

Two to three of the eight pilots have the potential for national scaling, Moens said.

Gum is one category Mondelez is focusing on when it comes to mobile marketing. Consumers' attention is directed at their mobile devices while waiting in line for the cash register instead of at the magazines and products sold there, including gum, according to the report. Two of Mondelez's Mobile Futures pilot programs sought to change that: Strident gum teamed with navigational app Waze on a campaign that offered mobile coupons to retailers such as Kum & Go LC and Target Corp. in California and Illinois. Waze also offered takeover ads when it detected a consumer was still for three seconds or more within certain geographic areas.

The Strident campaign is now being expanded to additional locations. "...We've been isolating smaller c-store mini-marts so we can run a Waze-only offer and we can do a control and exposed [sampling] to take a look and see the actual lift in sales activity as a result of this Waze-only offer so that we can tie it to a return on ad spend," explained Jordan Grossman, senior director of sales at Waze.

Trident gum also ran a location-based campaign with mobile advertising platform Roximity last year. That partnership has since extended to the Ritz cracker brand, which is not part of the Mobile Futures program.

Mondelez also reported positive results from the Mobile Futures pilot program that partnered Sour Patch Kids candy with mobile advertising network Kiip, as well as the two-part campaign for Halls cough drops conducted with the native engagement platform Dailybreak. A video and trivia game capitalized on location-based alerts, while an in-store and online initiative allowed consumers to unlock personalized content and coupons on a microsite.

Over the next two years, Mondelez wants to significantly invest in digital and mobile, prioritizing social media, video, mobile at retail and mobile media. Its long-term goal  reportedly is to compete in the advertising technology world as phase two of Mobile Futures.

"Toward summer, we started working on phase two of the program, which was about basically identifying big business challenges with the aim of launching our own startups, and we are working on that process now," Moens said. "The objective of phase two is really driving the entrepreneurial spirit with our own teams, so empowering them to come up with their own concepts and basically deliver new innovative technology that can be disruptive in the market."

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