NEW YORK - Del Monte Foods has experimented with mobile in the past but has not allocated significant marketing dollars to it. IAB MIXX panelists did their best to sway the food giant to do so.

During a panel at IAB MIXX, AdMob made the case for the effectiveness of mobile advertising by presenting Del Monte with a potential mobile campaign to promote its Meow Mix brand. Electronic Arts and Gigya also pitched Del Monte on its digital sectors, gaming and social media respectively.

?Mobile is in our marketing continuum, but it?s not leading the pack,? said Doug Chavez, senior manager of digital marketing at Del Monte Foods, San Francisco. ?It?s something we are looking to leverage more often in our plans if it fits the eyeballs we?re trying to reach.?

Del Monte Foods offers brands of canned goods targeting humans and pets alike, including Del Monte Produce, Meow Mix, Kibbles ?n Bits, Milk-Bone, 9Lives, Pounce, S&W and Contadina.

The brand has worked with AdMob in the past for its Fruit Undressed campaign.

With that campaign, Del Monte used existing content from its online properties and repurposed it for the mobile platform.

Mr. Chavez said that if consumers demanded it and surveys showed consumers were willing to spend more dollars on mobile, then his company would reevaluate its marketing strategy and ramp up its mobile initiatives.

During the panel, AdMob presented Mr. Chavez with a proposal for a mobile campaign for the cat food brand Meow Mix.

During the presentation, Tony Nethercutt, vice president of sales at AdMob, San Mateo, CA, showed a demo version of a mobile landing site where users could interact with the Meow Mix brand.

Del Monte?s animal products generally skew towards women ages 35 years and older who have pets.

AdMob decided to leverage content similar to the official Meow Mix Web site because Del Monte has already deemed those features important by placing them on the site.

On the fictional mobile landing site, users could watch videos, view products, make the Meow Mix jingle into a ringtone and opt in to receive the official Meow Mix newsletter.

To advertise the product, Mr. Nethercutt showed off several of AdMob?s capabilities, including click-to-canvas advertisements, multi-panel banner ads as the answer to animated .gif files on the mobile platform, text ads, canvas ads and click-to-watch-video advertisements.

EA's got game, Gigya's a social butterfly
Rebecca Nix, director global media sales at Electronic Arts, Redwood City, CA., shared a strategy for Kibbles ?n Bits to interact with users on Pogo.com, the video game manufacturer?s casual gaming site.

Ms. Nix said Kibbles ?N Bits could be integrated into already existing games like Pogo Puppies as a form of branding.

Besides pre-existing games, the dog food brand could also have games created for its, like Kibbles ?N Bits Yahtzee.

Ben Pashman, vice president of sales and business development at Gigya, Palo Alto, CA, presented Mr. Chavez with a social media strategy for Meow Mix.

The campaign would involve rich-media widgits letting users create images of cats singing and then post those to social networking sites like MySpace, Twitter and Facebook.

The user-posted widget would encourage friends of the user to also create a singing cat.

Mr. Chavez said he was impressed with all the presentations, but cautioned that at Del Monte, individual brand mangers may not be as forward-thinking about new advertising platforms.

That is where things get difficult.

Mr. Nethercutt said it is important to show brand managers and users the myths and preconceived notions regarding the mobile channel are not true.

?The notion of creativity is important,? he said. ?The preconceived notions of mobile having too small a screen or that there is nothing to do on it is a problem.

"However, the results of mobile campaigns speak for themselves."