Ahead of our 2018 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, well be previewing the nominees in each category, giving you a glimpse at the high quality of entries weve seen this year. Were kicking off with Most Effective Retail/FMCG Campaign or Solution, always a highly competitive category that sees innovative work every year.

Argos and Apadmi – My Argos Card App
The Argos Card is a retail program used exclusively by Argos customers to help manage their purchases. As part of a company-wide digital transformation project, Argos Financial Services partnered with Apadmi to create a bespoke mobile app solution for customers, aimed at improving their experience, boosting engagement, increasing loyalty and improving operational efficiency.

The team focused on creating native apps for both iOS and Android to ensure that customers were able to take advantage of all the native benefits offered by mobile, with huge attention paid to UX and UI to make the app more engaging. Smooth integration into existing back-office infrastructure was also vital, with a bespoke piece of middleware built to sit between the application layer and Argos Financial Services’ business-critical, legacy IT systems.

The app was a huge success, with over 750,000 active monthly users, and 32 per cent of all payments for Argos Financial Services now made via the app. It has become the largest digital payment channel for Argos Financial Services, and helped to reduce fraudulent activity by 72 per cent compared to non-digital channels. It has also formed a central part of the firm’s digital transformation, demonstrating business success across a multitude of areas in a quick space of time and in a scalable manner.

Curry’s PC World, GroundTruth and Blue449 – Currys PC World Prospecting and Retargeting campaign
As the UK’s largest electrical retailer, Curry’s PC World (CPCW) has digital innovative technology running through its core, and was keen to leverage what mobile location could do for its omnichannel marketing efforts, driving people into stores and delivering measurable return on ad spend. While 32 per cent of customers consider mobile the most important device for research, 70 per cent are still purchasing in-store, demonstrating that the linear customer journey has changed. This led CPCW to a campaign focused on producing verified results proving the effectiveness of online-to-offline marketing.

Media agency Blue449 worked with GroundTruth to build key audiences based on both current location and location history, as well as shopping behaviours and other data insights. Once audiences had been identified, compelling creative was produced that focused on driving incremental footfall, and the team worked to develop a tool that could more clearly measure the impact of digital activity on store visits.

The data led approach, coupled with the newly-built measurement tool, enabled CPCW to successfully boost footfall in stores and deliver a seamless online-to-offline experience. The mobile-location strategy alone drove 12.4 per cent incremental footfall to stores, and the new measurement tool was used across all digital activity, providing a much clearly picture of how the campaign was affecting in-store spending.

La Redoute and Criteo – Adaptive Revenue Optimisation
With consumers increasingly flocking online, La Redoute was looking for ways to improve the efficiency of its online advertising while keeping customers engaged with personalised messaging. The brand already used some features of Criteo’s Dynamic Retargeting service, enabling it to match up anonymous user profiles and serve targeted ads, but in order to improve both efficiency and revenues, it planned to use Criteo’s Adaptive Revenue Optimisation (ARO) tool, which would allow it to target the customers most likely to buy, at the best time.

Criteo’s ARO tool was able to tailor bidding across the campaign by responding to changes in the bidding ecosystem on a 24/7 programmatic basis. Supported by machine learning and combined with the scale of data available through Criteo’s network, this ensured that La Redoute could target the right user, at the right time, at the right price.

The granularity and agility of the technology at play proved extremely valuable for La Redoute in maintaining the benefits of unique individual product recommendations, while the automation of bid monitoring freed up the team to spend time elsewhere. Over a six-month period, the campaign surpassed La Redoute’s target for reducing cost per sale, and saw sales and revenues both increasing substantially.

Merck Animal Health and Creative Digital Agency – My Vet Offers
Merck Animal Health was looking for ways to boost sales and market share for Bravecto, a flea and tick medication for cats and dogs. In the animal health industry, thousands of small independent vet clinics serve as both retailer and brand advocate, making up the single biggest factor for boosting sales, but as each clinic has its own POS system, a scalable mobile coupon integration is all but impossible.

Merck’s solution was to create My Vet Offers, a mobile-first web app build specifically to drive engagement within vet clinics. The web app handled both sides of the mobile coupon experience: distribution for pet owners, and redemption and reimbursement for vets. It offered pet owners helpful automated reminders, and provided vet clinics with a frictionless redemption process, especially compared to time-consuming paper rebate methods.

The program overwhelmingly achieved its goals, with each participating clinic selling an additional 11 doses of Bravecto every day. As well as generating new revenues for Merck and the participating clinics, it also created an all-new end-user database for re-engagement that also prompts pet owners when it’s time for a new dose of Bravecto. The success of the campaign has led to mobile becoming a top priority for Merck Animal Health, which is investing new resources in the area and continues to scale and expand the My Vet Offers program.

Oreo, Blis and Carat – Oreo: Cookie Quest
Following the release of several new Oreo flavours and products in 2017, the brand was looking for a campaign that would turn consumers’ attention back toward the core Vanilla Oreo product. With families and children forming a key audience for the product, Oreo took inspiration from location-based apps such as Pokémon Go and created a game called ‘Cookie Quest’ that was available as both a standalone app and a rich media creative.

The first step in the campaign was to profile relevant audiences, with location tracking used to identify families at key locations such as commuter stations, family holiday destinations and toy stores. Rich media advertising was then delivered to profiled audiences when they were at home, close to stores stocking Oreo core products, or in proximity of an Oreo out-of-home site at Tottenham Court Road station, with creative changing depending on location.

The campaign delivered fantastic results against its objective of increasing sales of the core Oreo product, with 5.9 per cent footfall uplift to stores and out-of-home locations, and multipack sales of Oreo’s core product up almost 20 per cent during the campaign. Oreo felt that the campaign helped the brand reconnect with consumers by focusing back on the core product and the firm’s family audience, as well as demonstrating the power of playful creative to deliver true ROI.

Very.co.uk and Fetch – Winning the Christmas Retail Race on the Second Screen
Christmas is the most important time of the year for Very.co.uk, with a significant percentage of its annual sales coming in during the October-to-December period, which ramps up from Black Friday to the end of the year sales. Lacking the budget of Argos, Currys or John Lewis, Very decided that it’s smartest approach to TV advertising would be to win the race for the second screen: mobile.

During the Christmas 2017 period, Very.co.uk took several steps to ensure it would ‘win Christmas’ on the second screen. Mobile ads served on target customers’ favourite apps were synchronised with TV campaigns by Very and its competitors, with gamified rich media units used to engage customers. Spotify playlists with ‘party’ in the name were targeted with audio advertising, performance activity was used throughout November and December to convert sales, and geo-targeting and location-based strategies were used to target busy shoppers in Very’s target audiences.

The campaign was highly successful, smashing Very.co.uk’s target for year-on-year sales growth by almost three times. 73 per cent of seasonal online sales came via mobile, while second screening activity boosted brand awareness by 10 per cent. The integrated strategy managed to break through the noise of other retailers’ promotions and reached key target audiences in the moments that really mattered.

Join us to find out the winners of our 2018 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards at our prestigious Awards Ceremony on 15 November. Tickets are available now, so book your place and celebrate the industrys best and brightest with us.