Last month, Mondelez announced eight startups selected to participate in the company’s Shopper Futures program – a mobile marketing initiative that partners tech and mobile startups with retailers to transform the consumer retailer experience. The startups now work together with retailers in collaboration with Mondelez to bring in-market pilots to life over the next 90 days.
We spoke with Neil Sweeney, president and CEO of Freckle IoT– one of the four Canadian startups chosen to participate in the program. For the next 90 days, Freckle will be working with 7-Eleven and Mondelez’s Oreo and belVita brands in the U.S.
How does Freckle IoT work?
Freckle functions as a mobile attribution platform for brands to reach consumers both in-store and out of store through mobile devices with beacons. Freckle’s network of applications enabled with the Freckle SDK (software development kit) have the ability to interact with beacons that have been placed in locations such as bars, restaurants and airports as well as affixed to outdoor advertising signage. When a consumer has downloaded a native application that has been integrated with the Freckle SDK, they are asked to opt-in to receive notifications as well as track their location.
These publisher applications fuel Freckle from a data perspective, as they are able to determine how many of their users were seen in a specific restaurant or airport, in turn allowing advertisers to change their messaging based on the proximity and history of the user.
We help brands and retailers understand and target consumers. With Freckle’s solution, retailers have the option to place a beacon in a physical store to attribute who was in or within proximity of a store and serve them the most relevant ad format explained above.
All of these pieces work together to reveal the path to purchase.
What grocery shopping problem does Freckle solve? How does it improve the consumer retail experience?
The current state of attributing sales is a catch all – brands can do a marketing push, new product launch, lots of PR etc. and play a guessing game as to what is responsible for an increase in sales. With Freckle, brands and retailers have the opportunity to directly target and, in turn, attribute door swing based on a qualified interaction between a consumer and a beacon in proximity of a product.
Why do you think retailers should use your technology?
If a retailer is executing a beacon strategy, they are only gathering information from a group of people that have already actively chosen to shop in their store.
Consumers these days are agnostic to the stores they shop in and this siloed data doesn’t have any scale. Compounding this is the data about what is happening in a closed environment (i.e. brick and mortar) which is not used in conjunction with all of a retailers other media. They are collecting all this data from consumers but have no way to use it to affect a wider spread of marketing efforts. This is the silo. In addition, retailers that focus on a notification strategy are not acknowledging that there are other retailers doing similar things as them – meaning the customer could receive multiple notifications from multiple retailers due to the isolation. Retailers need to consider their objectives before executing beacons.
With Freckle, retailers are only one piece of the overall puzzle to an informed consumer profile. Retailers who contribute to our Open Beacon Network can help themselves and brands attribute foot traffic and utilize data to target consumers and serve hyperlocal messaging to.
Has knowing the retailer and brand you’ll be working with influenced your approach to bringing the pilot to life? Why is your technology particularly useful to them?
Each retailer and client is different but has a ton of common elements. Working with a retailer that has multiple locations creates an interesting opportunity to collect a lot of data from our campaign as well as some fun brands with some interesting current marketing that we are looking to take to the next level with location and attribution.
Where do you see the company in, say, five years?
Five years? How about five months! Freckle is moving so fast everything can be calculated like dog years.
Freckle’s ultimate goal is to be the largest mobile attribution company in the world. We are working aggressively to expand the company and its products globally in order to achieve that—and we will.
This article originally appeared at CanadianGrocer.com.
