Dive Brief:
- Forward-looking marketers view wearable technology as “the new mobile” as a channel to reach audiences and are turning to Strap to get started.
- Strap is a startup company based around app monetization and ad networks for wearables and has received $1.25 million in venture funding.
- Mondelez is an early client with a pilot campaign set to run within the next month.
Dive Insight:
"Wearable technology is becoming the next mobile, and it's important for us as a brand to understand how we can best leverage it," Mindy Rickert, associate director-shopper marketing for small-format stores at Mondelez, told Ad Age.
Mondelez gave wearable marketing startup Strap a pilot campaign involving Trident gum and the Kum & Go convenience store chain with the effort set to run on the chain’s app.
Strap was founded by Steve Caldwell along with software development partners, and after an accelerator program demo day pulled in $1.25 million in venture funding.
Caldwell told Ad Age, "Being a geek at heart, I started writing apps for it," leading to "thinking through things like app monetization for wearable developers and ad networks for wearables."
He pointed out one of the marketing implications of wearable data, "Studies show emails sitting there in your inbox first thing in the morning typically get the most attention. If you know when someone usually wakes up, you can send them a message 10 minutes before so it's the first thing they see."
Wearables are at an interesting point in their story where they are still seen as more of a novelty than a necessity, similar to how smartphones started out before becoming ubiquitous. Earlier this summer, Kanter described the wearables category as "young" and "volatile," noting that the Apple Watch's entry would likely tilt the ad spend scales.