Tag: mobile ads

Taco Bell tracks phone user habits to target its mobile ads

| March 17, 2016

The goal is to ensure that people will be swayed and will want to buy from the breakfast menu.

Taco Bell knows that the millennial generation is its primary target market, and the fast food company is now tracking its cell phone toting customers in order to be able to best design their mobile ads strategy.

The idea is to reach these mobile device users the moment they get up in the morning to make them crave breakfast.

Not just any breakfast, of course. The mobile ads are a part of a campaign to help to promote the new breakfast menu. Earlier this month, Taco Bell rolled out 10 new breakfast items with the highly affordable price tag of only $1 each. This is the latest step in encouraging people to think of their quick service restaurants for their first meal of the day – an effort that began back in 2014.

To make sure these mobile ads go out at the perfect moment, Taco Bell tracks customer phone activity and data.

Taco Bell Targets Mobile AdsAccording to the Taco Bell vice president of media and brand partnerships, Juliete Corsinita, “We’ve honed our media skills over the last couple of years.” As a part of this effort, the company is also working with Aki, a mobile advertising firm that attempts to “target mobile moments”.

The way Aki works is that it starts by tracking the phone activity and data of a mobile device user. This allows it to target its smartphone ads based on exceptionally specific habits and behaviors such as knowing which apps are used by a smartphone user first thing in the morning. It can learn the times of day when someone looks at a breakfast recipe as well as the favorite news apps for catching up on what’s going on in the world before the day begins.

Taco Bell has also been tinkering with the Wishbone mobile app that makes it possible for users to ask their followers to complete mini-polls that have participants choosing their favorite images. When the app is opened, they’re asked which between two pictures is the best. Starting earlier this month, one of these efforts in mobile ads in disguise has asked people to choose between a piece of flat bread or the new flatbread quesadilla sold at the restaurants.

4Info and Crossix team up to see if mobile ads work on medical patients

| March 8, 2016

The two companies will advertise to people who order drug refills and who visit their doctors.

Smartphone advertising firm, 4Info, has just joined up with Crossix, a pharmaceutical data company, in order to test mobile ads within the market of patients who have either visited their doctors or have ordered refills of their prescription medications.

The goal of this partnership is to determine the level of influence mobile advertising can have in this space.

The new partnership will work to measure the level of influence of mobile ads when they are delivered to people who are visiting a medical specialist or having a prescription filled. The new strategic relationship between the two companies is being made to gauge the potential of mobile devices when carefully targeting consumers within the space of the highly regulated health care industry. This has been among the goals of 4Info for some time, as it has been seeking a strategic partner for stepping into the pharmaceuticals market.

The key is to make sure there is an appropriate balance between the timing and industry regulations for the mobile ads.

mobile ads - drug refillAccording to Tim Jenkins, the CEO of 4Info, “Pharma is a huge opportunity.” Before his company partnered up with Crossix in this effort, it had previously been working with advertisers in the pharmaceutical industry in the area of targeting advertisements for non-prescription medications, through the data available via loyalty card programs.

To be clear, no medical data is used by Crossix in order to identify a specific disease or condition that an individual is treating. This will not be the nature of the mobile advertising strategy pursued by the two companies in the partnership. Instead, it obtains information from healthcare data distributors as well as individual businesses. With an analysis of that data, it determines the likelihood of a specific individual for a certain health affliction based on the non-prescription drug purchases that person has made along with the use of a loyalty card, information from prescription refills through retail pharmacies, or medical claims data that suggests a doctor has been seen.

The outcome is that, by way of data models, the companies will be able to make certain educated hypotheses as to what type of conditions each consumer could potentially have. Beyond that, 4Info tracks mobile device locations when certain apps are opened in order to determine whether or not the user is at home. When a location has been decided to be a user’s home location, targeted mobile apps based on the assumptions about that individual will be issued.