Hershey’s Turns to Mobile Ads to Push Its Line of…Beef Jerky?

You could be forgiven for not being aware that Hershey’s sells beef jerky under its Krave line. You could even be forgiven for being alarmed that a company famous for chocolate is pushing delicious strips of smoked beef. A lot of people are in that same boat, and Hershey’s put together quite the strategy to reach them: mobile ads in grocery stores.

Faced with the issue of how the provider of delicious chocolate pivots to sell equally delicious but for completely different reasons beef jerky, Hershey’s turned to inMarket to get the job done. Specifically, it turned to inMarket’s Preceptivity platform which allowed the company to better predict when customers were most likely to make a store visit. So to that end, Hershey could then tailor advertising elsewhere on both mobile and desktop websites to push the jerky accordingly.

Then, once customers were likely to have reached the store, the reminder advertising kicked in on mobile devices to try and push customers over to the jerky. Even if the customer did ultimately pick up a package of Krave jerky, the advertising didn’t stop, giving Hershey’s the opportunity to “…connect with shoppers who were physically holding Krave inside a store.”

The ad blitz worked, to a degree: brand awareness was up from 9.2 percent ahead of the advertising scheme to 15.8 percent after. Better yet, planned purchases were up to 26.8 percent, who planned to pick up the jerky in question.

On the one hand, this is a great use of advertising technology to deliver the message desired at the right time. On the other, this is a slippery slope leading straight to a disaster. This worked well for Krave; now how many other companies will want to get in on this? From Barilla pasta to Prego spaghetti sauce and most everything in between, every denizen of the grocery store will want to pile on in the hopes of jacking up their own brand awareness to nearly double what it is currently, like Krave did.

Essentially, our mobile devices might soon explode with advertising the second we even glance in a Food Lion’s direction. That’s not a positive development, and might well crash any hope of gain before it’s ultimately launched.