Campbell Soup Co. is one of two consumer packaged goods brands piloting a new mobile advertising platform that lets brands deliver personalized ads based on purchasing behavior and tie their media buy back to in-store sales.

The mobile advertising campaign, which is getting to ready launch, will focus on Campbell?s Pace brand and tracking how brand advertising on mobile translates to in-store sales. The consumer packaged goods giant has been ramping up its mobile advertising strategy of late and is also the exclusive launch advertiser in Shop Rite?s new mobile commerce application (see story).

?If all you have is the equivalent of a cookie, the identifier, but you don?t have any insights behind it, you really are lacking how you build a campaign, who is the audience, who you should reach and what is happening with that audience in the last six to 52 weeks,? said Chris Henger, executive vice president of digital at Catalina Marketing, St. Petersburg, FL.

?In mobile today, in CPG, nobody is closing the loop to prove that your online advertising is driving in-store sales lift,? he said.

?Because we have an in-store media business, we have the raw data, we have a treasure trove of insights about what is happening in the category and with the brand.?

Campbell Soup Co. did not respond to press inquiries by the deadline.

The cookie problem
Campbell?s is leveraging Catalina?s newly launch BuyerVision Mobile platform for the campaign. The platform, which was developed with help from Nielsen and 4Info, includes 70 million households whose mobile devices have been identified, anonymized and tied to recent purchasing data.

One of the challenges facing brands in trying to deliver mobile ads that are personalized based on purchasing behavior and tied to in-store sales results has been the lack of a universal cookie in mobile that can be used to track devices.

Catalina is helping brands address this by merging its own shopper data with media and household purchasing data from Nielsen and 4Info?s offline household database.

The next step was connecting this information to a mobile device, which is accomplished using 4Info?s proprietary technology and algorithms that identify mobile devices across a variety of platforms and apps, anonymizing the information and tying this to profiles built over time based on location and ad requests.

?Part of their secret sauce is their ability to identify a device ID, randomize it and have the location come from the consumer opting in or allowing the sharing of their location, whether at the operating-system level or the app level,? Mr. Henger said.

Ads from brand marketers such as Campbell?s are appearing in apps or on the mobile Web and are being delivered through mobile aggregators, networks as well as some specific premium inventory.

Campbell?s is leveraging mobile in other ways.

The company?s Swanson brand recently placed QR codes on static print ads in the January 2013 issue of Bon Appetit to show users how to incorporate its products into recipes (see story).

In 2011, a Campbell iAd campaign received about 53 million impressions, with approximately 530,000 of the users that saw the ad clicking through and engaging with it for nearly one minute (see story).

?One of the challenges with mobile is that it is such a personal device and impersonal messaging, whether is push message, an ad, or an offer, it doesn?t matter what it is or who it is coming from it is not well received,? John Caron, vice president of marketing for Catalina Marketing.

?We know to how to leverage historical purchases, data and analytics to be able to identify and drive the right campaign in order to allow that to define the media that you see in app or mobile web on your smartphone," he said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York