Kellogg Co. taps mobile to drive loyalty reward redemptions

Kellogg Co. taps mobile to drive loyalty reward redemptions 

October 4, 2013

Kellogg's new mobile site

Kellogg Co. has launched a new mobile and Web experience that integrates into the company’s loyalty program to make it simpler for consumers to receive rewards.

Kellogg has revamped its digital download store so that consumers can enter and redeem points for the brand’s Family Rewards program. Kellogg worked with Hip Digital on this mobile effort.

“Mobile is and will continue to be a critical channel in the expansion of the Kellogg’s Family Rewards program,” said Kim Begeman, associate director at Kellogg Loyalty, Battle Creek, MI.

“Currently we offer a mobile-optimized Web site, the ability to text in codes and delivery of relevant outbound SMS messages with bonus codes,” she said. “Moving forward we will continue to develop mobile capabilities to facilitate participation and enhance the personalized KFR experience.”

Mobile loyalty
The site can be accessed at http://kfr.hipdigital.com via a desktop or mobile device.

Consumers are then prompted to log-in either through an account or by linking the site to a Facebook account.

Once a consumer is logged in, he or she can enter codes that are found on packages of Kellogg products from brands including Pringles, Keebler and Cheez-It.

The points can then be redeemed for digital gift cards and currencies to Amazon, Hulu, Kingsisle and Webkinz.

For example, consumers can receive one free month of Hulu in exchange for seven currencies.

A screenshot of the new site on a tablet

Rewards also include music, and results can be filtered by criteria including album, song or artist. Songs cost one credit each.

Consumers can also browse through ebook and audio book content.

Due to Apple’s closed system, consumers can only download content such as music straight to their mobile devices via iTunes.

Therefore, the site includes a storage locker feature that lets consumers participate and browse content from an iPhone or iPad device. When users find an item that they want to download, they are sent an email with a link that they can click on to retrieve the content from a PC device.

Consumers accessing the site through all other operating systems are able to directly download content.

The site is also planned to include a Spanish version soon.

Holiday plans
Kellogg is also rolling out a holiday-themed program called “The Gift of Music” that gives members a few mobile-exclusive components.

For example, there is an augmented reality app that syncs with packaging to bring a product to life and let consumers watch 3D concerts from musicians such as Kellie Pickler, Conor Maynard and Chris Daughtry.

The program also links back into the mobile loyalty site to let members receive a music download for each code entered from specially-marked products in addition to the points that they already receive.

As an alternative to the one code per song download, consumers can stash five points to receive a $10 gift card filled with currencies that can be used to redeem music.

For a CPG brand such as Kellogg, mobile is a natural way for the brand to speed up loyalty-building efforts since mobile streamlines the entire redemption process and can therefore propel more consumers to participate.

“What we are seeing in the consumer marketplace is a huge growth in smartphone adoption and time spent online across all mobile touch points,” said Baris Karadogan, CEO of Hip Digital Media, Menlo Park, CA.

“The natural correlation for a loyalty program and any in-store promotion for a CPG brand like Kellogg’s is to offer the consumer accessibility and instant gratification on mobile,” he said.

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

McDonald's beefs up mobile social ads on Facebook with rich media

McDonald's beefs up mobile social ads on Facebook with rich media

October 2, 2013

McDonald's marries mobile and social

McDonald’s is launching its first mobile advertising campaign that leverages Facebook and Twitter to serve up a rich media experience as part of a multichannel marketing push to promote a new line of chicken wings.

The fast food giant’s campaign launched earlier this week with ad placements within the Facebook and Twitter mobile applications and the National Football League mobile site. The mobile ads tie into a bigger marketing push that McDonald’s is using to get the word out about its new products, including TV spots and social media.

“This is the first time that McDonald’s has done mobile rich media in Facebook and Twitter,” said Dirk Rients, senior vice president and director of mobile at DDB Chicago, Chicago.

“It’s also an engaging experience with the video and the ability to share content – it’s a good fit for us as far as our target audience is concerned,” he said.

McDonald’s worked with DDB Chicago to create the campaign.

Mobile is social
McDonald’s features NFL quarterbacks Joe Flacco and Colin Kaepernick in a television ad that shows the two Super Bowl XLVII rivals competing with each other over the fast food giant’s new chicken wings.

The TV spot ends with a black-out and prompts consumers to uncover who has the Mighty Wings with the hashtag #MightyWings.

Creative for the mobile lets consumers either learn more about the Mighty Wings or view all of the suspects.

A screenshot of the ad

If users choose to learn more about the products, a store locator pulls in a consumer’s location and plots a restaurant on a map.

The other option within the mobile ad lets consumers learn about the seven suspects, which include a team mascot, a cheerleader, a fan, a reporter and a groundskeeper in addition to the two quarterbacks.

Consumers can then vote for which character they believe is the culprit. The ad then tallies the votes to show the total percentage of votes for each character.

There is also a desktop version of the campaign running within the Facebook, Twitter and NFL Web sites.

The Mighty Wings are a bone-in seasoned chicken wing that is available at McDonald’s through mid-November.

Consumers can find a store

Driving foot traffic
Similar to other McDonald’s mobile ad campaigns, the goal behind the campaign is to increase new product awareness by driving consumers to a store.

In addition to the mobile and social rich media ads, McDonald’s is also using an iAd and location-based ads to promote Mighty Wings.

Besides mobile advertising, McDonald’s also recently partnered with the NFL on a mobile app to give consumers access to exclusive content that is found on codes placed on packaging as part of the marketing push (see story).

“It’s about promoting the new products and getting people excited for the new product and the ability to find the nearest location,” Mr. Rients said. “It fits into our overall strategy around McDonald’s.”

Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Marketer. Reach her at lauren@mobilemarketer.com. Follow her on Twitter: @LaurenJohnson.

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Buy a beer share, invest in a local brewery

Buy a beer share, invest in a local brewery 

Big Alice Brewing is located in an old Bible warehouse in Queens, N.Y.; the bottles are all hand-corked with hemp ties.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney)

"Community-supported beer" doesn't just mean buying a pint at your local watering hole. For a growing number of upstart breweries, it's how they're getting their operations off the ground.

Queens' Big Alice Brewing -- located in an old Bible warehouse near the water -- opened its doors in June and is selling beer shares as a way to finance the brewery. Inspired by the concept of community-supported agriculture, in which people buy directly from farmers, CSB subscribers pay $200 and receive two large bottles of beer each month for six months

Other breweries use different price points, time frames and methods of delivery, but the concept is the same: Buyers commit to a certain amount of beer for a certain amount of time, and the brewery gets guaranteed cash up front. Combined with more traditional methods of financing, it's an attractive way to solicit investment -- and get locals involved with the brewery.

Big Alice's three cofounders initially invested about $35,000 to buy the equipment and convert the space, which they began work on in August 2012. They started brewing in January, and five months later had 20 batches of beer. The brewery used its first round of beer shares -- which started in July and runs through December -- to finance much of the raw materials like grain, yeast, bottles and corks.

Related: Small craft breweries hit it big

With flavors like salted caramel, purple potato trippel, and chamomile ale, subscribers were promised 12 different beers over the course of their share. Two-thirds of the first 90 shares went to friends and family and the remaining 30 were snapped up on the first day they were offered to the public.

At Seattle's NW Peaks, Kevin Klein offers mountainBeers subscribers a 64-oz. growler for about $11 a month. The model provided roughly $10,000 in the first few months -- enough for supplies, rent and some additional equipment -- and also allowed NW Peaks to "brew to the number of subscribers," Klein said. "We could make sure that we had enough beer and enough product instead of killing ourselves to make more when we didn't need it."

Chicago's Begyle Brewing started distributing kegs to local bars in October 2012, but the brewery's goal was always to sell directly to customers. They used "every facet of financing" to get off the ground, according to cofounder Kevin Cary. Investments from the three owners, friends and family, bank loans -- even a Kickstarter campaign to buy a specialized growler filler.

With the $18,000 raised from Kickstarter, they hope to have the retail space up and running by mid-November. Once the space is operational, they'll launch their CSB, offering a certain number of growler fills a month for subscribers.

"If we have 200 members all paying at once, that's a nice cash infusion," said Cary. "If we can handle more than 200 members, we can leverage that to secure a bank loan or another piece of equipment that will help us grow the brewery."

Related: Jim Koch: Samuel Adams' beer revolutionary

That's how Big Alice sees its beer share program. Cofounder Scott Berger said they are already looking to expand their brewing system, which would offer 21 times the capacity they currently have. They'll need more investment and capital to actually buy the equipment, but he says they can use the next round of shares to buy the raw materials -- which will run about $5,000 per brew day, or $20,000 a month.

Currently, the beer shares make up two-thirds of their sales (they sell the remaining bottles to the public on Friday evenings. But they plan to sell to local bars and restaurants, as well as specialty beer shops, with the expansion. They also hope that two of the founders (who are the brewers) will eventually be able to start to work at Big Alice full-time.

But even as they grow, all three breweries plan to continue with the community-supported financing.

"It's a way for our members to be a part of our growth," said Begyle's Cary. "It makes you part of the team in a way and you get to be there and watch the brewery grow." 

The Day that SEO Died (Sort of)

The Day that SEO Died (Sort of) - 'Net Features - Website Magazine

Search engine optimization professionals awoke yesterday morning to news that Google went "all in" on its initiatives to encrypt search data. Today, 100 percent of the referrer data on search queries from organic traffic is not provided. Folks, this is the day that SEO (as you know it) died…but that’s OK because you’re going to start thinking differently.

Google has effectively and virtually handcuffed the entire digital marketing community by encrypting search data. When Internet professionals like you don’t have access to keyword search data, they won’t know what drives traffic to their sites and they certainly won’t be able to understand what strategic or tactical SEO efforts they make are resulting in conversions. Whether the intent is to drive you to AdWords or not, the main source of data for many enterprises has simply vanished overnight. It gets worse. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Or is there? 

Keyword data samples from Yahoo and Bing are too low, and the data provided by Google within Webmaster tools doesn’t currently have page correlation much less conversion correlation. But that doesn’t mean that savvy search engine optimization professionals (and SEO platform providers - ahem) aren’t going to try. While one shortcut to getting this data back is to head on over to AdWords, there is a lot more work necessary to understand organic performance in the future for those that don’t go this route in this new reality. But it’s not the end of the Web world.

Here’s what will likely happen. SEOs still have access to page-level data and more importantly can understand the referral source for each page. That’s important information but it is only the first step to regaining some of the insights you had about the intent of your userbase yesterday (much less two years ago when keyword not provided wasn’t even a thing). SEOs will now need to combine the rank tracking data they receive from popular search engine optimization tools (more on that below) and the search visit data per page (provided by any analytics tool), and cross reference and correlate that information with any keyword data that’s available within Google Webmaster Tools (limited to 2,000 queries per day). Whew! That’s going to be a lot of work!

The result of efforts like these today, for many, will be a long list of pages that get search visits and are known as those that target specific search terms, which, of course, rank in the SERPs. All that data crunching is going to come at an immense cost in time – much to the pleasure, we can assume, of platforms that make it their business to solve these sorts of problems. What will happen over time is that website owners will again turn to SEO solutions as a means to develop and control/manage their SEO efforts. These are tools and platforms Website Magazine regularly features such as WebCEO or Moz, as well as the numerous companies on last year’s Master List of SEO Tools, which is almost ready for a new and improved 2013 version.

There is an even better way to handle this issue. Stop thinking about ranking entirely or which keywords cause which action on which page. Instead, focus on the user, their experience and the impact those customers make on your enterprise. That’s likely not going to be the answer you want to hear, but that’s what you’ll get from anyone talking about this topic today.

In the future, you’ll likely see even less data about your users (all in the name of privacy). But using marketing automation platforms connected with customer relationship databases and the robust big data capabilities of your SEO software solutions, will help all digital enterprises enter a truly new age, one where we’ll evolve from SEOs to brand advocates who are more concerned with ROI than placement on a search engine.

- See more at: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2013/09/24/the-day-that-seo-died-sort-of.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter#sthash.tIONqNZI.dpuf

Pinterest Dominates Social Referrals, But Facebook Drives Higher Performance [Study]

Pinterest Dominates Social Referrals, But Facebook Drives Higher Performance [Study]

Publishers in women’s programming verticals such as food and recipes, home and garden, style and health and wellness have found a deep, high volume source of referral traffic from Pinterest.

A new study by Yieldbot, which sees over a 1.5 billion page views per month come through its publisher analytics platform, looks at the impact of social referral traffic on the advertising performance of women’s sites. The ad technology firm found that while Pinterest sends oodles of traffic, those visitors don’t click on ads at same rate as Facebook referrals.

The table below illustrates the overwhelming dominance of Pinterest among the top social networks referring traffic to women’s sites. The exception is on mobile where Facebook refers significantly more traffic than Pinterest. Twitter and Tumblr barely register.

Now, compare the volume of referral traffic by these social networks to the click-through rate (CTR) on ads from that traffic. Facebook — desktop and to a larger degree mobile — outperforms the other networks by far, while Pinterest lags well behind.

Publishers that monetize based on ad clicks may now be raising their eyebrows. As AdAgenotes in their coverage of the study, 66 percent of digital advertising is sold on a CPC or other performance-based metric according to the IAB. Whereas just 32 percent is sold on an impression basis.

What’s a publisher whose site is primarily monetized by ad clicks to do? Is Pinterest the revenue-driving dud it appears to be?

When I asked Yieldbot CEO Jonathan Mendez if Pinterest still drives more volume of ad clicks than Facebook despite the lower CTR, he replied, “From a volume perspective yes, orders of magnitude more clicks are from Pinterest than Facebook.”

So, yes, Facebook referrals drive a higher concentration of performance, but Pinterest still wins the volume game.

That said, social channels on the whole don’t perform as well as other channels in generating ad clicks — 36 percent below average. Mendez says that is due in part to the fact that the ads are not geared toward social referrers and sees opportunity in this area.

In particular, “publishers need to do a better job of generating volume on Facebook,” writes Mendez.

When asked by email whether Tumblr and Twitter’s poor showing is a reflection of low activity on these platforms by women’s sites or if referral performance is truly dismal, Mendez replied that publishers outside of news and entertainment haven’t figured out how to use Twitter and Tumblr to engage and drive traffic to their sites. He ads, “Don’t forget, many pubs spent the better part of the last few years focused on building apps and getting installs at the expense of inbound web marketing.”

80pc willing to exchange location data for relevant brand messages: report

80pc willing to exchange location data for relevant brand messages: report - Mobile Marketer - Research

September 24, 2013

Users want relevant messages in exchange for personal data

A new survey released today by mBlox and Millward Brown found that 80 percent of mobile users would share location data with brands in order to receive SMS or push messages.

The report based on the survey’s findings, "Engagement: What Consumers Really Think," reveals that while mobile users are open to receiving brand messaging, most said they would prefer to communicate with known or favorite brands. Respondents also indicated a preference for relevant communications.

“This study provides a proof point that mobile has the opportunity to enable marketers to better engage people on a global scale,” said Stacy Adams, vice president of marketing at mBlox, Sunnyvale, CA.

“To date, mobile has been a difficult entry point for marketers, because, as an industry, we took what didn’t work on the Web and moved it to mobile environments, such as standard Web-based banner ads that send users outside the app or mobile Web site and pre-roll video ads that force people to watch them, disrupting their user experience,” she said.

“Plus, when mobile applications were gaining traction, marketers put a great deal of time and budget into them without realizing how difficult it would be to keep the user engaged through them. But we expect that number to move in a more positive direction as marketers embrace push notifications, in-app messaging and SMS as ways to re-engage those who have downloaded mobile apps.”

Privacy concernsKey findings from the report include that 59 percent of global respondents prefer SMS and push campaigns over other forms of mobile marketing, including video advertising, banner or standard display ads and email.

When asked why they would share location data with a company, 47 percent would do so to receive relevant offers or discount coupons; 45 percent would do so to receive information they have requested; 36 percent would do so to help them solve customer service issues and 24 percent would do so to check-in or post on social networking sites.

“Marketers are so nervous about privacy concerns that they are reluctantly shying away from mobile marketing,” Ms. Adams said. “The survey findings reveal that they don’t have to be.

“According to Millward Brown Digital, 80 percent of global respondents, an overwhelming majority, would share location data with a company from whom they’ve downloaded an app in order to receive SMS or push messages.”

Underused tacticThe report also makes the point that while SMS messages are an effective mobile engagement tactic, many marketers are still underusing it, with only one in five marketers reportedly having sent an SMS message last year.

In contrast, 58 percent of global respondents say they would send a text message to a company to request more information and 54 percent would send a text to a company to enter a competition.

Mobile adoption continues to grow, with text messaging one of users’ favorite activities.

As mobile commerce also gains steam, marketers need to recognize that SMS provides a large global reach and can effectively be used to encourage purchases, per the report.

Another key finding is that 57 percent of global respondents and 60 percent of U.S. respondents find SMS and push messages more likely to persuade them to make a purchase than other forms of marketing on a mobile device, including advertising commercials or video advertising, banner or standard display advertising and email marketing messages.

Global reachAdditional key findings include that 68 percent of global respondents and 66 percent of U.S. respondents find SMS or push messages sent to them from a company to be valuable and 75 percent of global respondents and 75 percent of U.S. respondents are likely to read or engage with SMS and push marketing messages, such as location-triggered coupons, updates or deals relevant to the mobile apps downloaded.

The survey, which was conducted in July, includes responses from 1,572 mobile users who had downloaded an app in the past 12 month across the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

“SMS gives marketers access to a large global reach, and SMS and push marketing also better engages people in a way that is consistent with their preferences, adds value and persuades purchase intent more than other tactics," Ms. Adams said.  

“Marketers not engaging people around the world via SMS and push mobile marketing messages are missing a huge opportunity,” she said.

Final TakeChantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York 

Associate Editor Chantal Tode covers advertising, messaging, legal/privacy and database/CRM. Reach her at chantal@mobilemarketer.com.

Mobile now accounts for most online time in US

MediaPost Publications Most Digital Time Spent In Mobile 09/24/2013

Speaking at OMMA Mobile on Monday, Josh Chasin, chief research officer, comScore, began his talk by presenting data about how consumers are using their mobile devices. For starters, we’re up to 140 smartphones in the U.S., about half of all mobile phones.

There are 70 million tablet users -- it’s the fastest adopted technology since the cell phone. More than half (52%) of digital time spent is on a smartphone or tablet. Apps dominate, with 85% of time spent versus 15% in mobile Web.

There are 15 million mobile users whot access Web only via mobile; three-fifths of that group are women. As has been widely established, mobile phones are used throughout the day, PCs used mostly during the day, and tablets mostly in the evening.

Media time is not necessarily a zero sum game. Time spent on PCs is up a bit, while mobile and tablet time is up. How can time spent on all platforms rise? Multitasking.

Categories like sports and weather, however, have shifted more toward mobile devices from the desktop. The majority of Internet users are now accessing Web across both mobile and desktop.

In terms of top sites, even publishers like Google and Yahoo are seeing a growing incremental audience from mobile. About 30% of Facebook’s audience is coming just from mobile. Ninety percent of U.S. mobile adults are going on Facebook

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/209716/most-digital-time-spent-in-mobile.html#ixzz2fpI7CNDX