By adding mobile to an annual campaign this year, White Cloud facial tissue brought a new level of excitement and urgency that helped to triple results. 

White Cloud facial tissue has increased threefold the number of consumers participating in a campaign it is conducting in partnership with Children?s Miracle Network Hospitals after the tissue brand implemented some changes to make this year?s promotion more mobile-friendly. Most significantly, it allowed consumers to vote every hour on their favorite tissue-box design  ? a new facet of the campaign facilitated by mobile.

?This year the program was definitely more mobile-friendly,? said Nadia Durasamy, marketing manager at Kruger Products. ?Everything was done for the mobile setting.

?With voting every hour on the hour, we knew it was going to be important to be user-friendly on mobile as well as on tablet,? she said.

Improved scrolling
Last year consumers were only able to vote once per day for their favorite tissue-box design. This year the brand was able to foster ongoing engagement throughout the day by allowing hourly voting via mobile devices.

The White Cloud brand, owned by Kruger Products, optimized its Web site for mobile and worked to ensure that its messaging via email and Facebook was easy to navigate on smartphones and tablets. 

White Cloud is a tissue brand sold exclusively at Walmart. This was the second year the brand partnered with Children?s Miracle Network on the campaign, which asks consumers to vote on tissue-box designs crafted by children who are being treated at CMN Hospitals and then markets the ?Miracle Design? boxes for a limited time.

With this year?s mobile enhancements, the campaign drove a 50 percent increase in registrants for an accompanying sweepstakes entry in addition to tripling the number of consumers who voted, Ms. Durasamy said.

White Cloud improved the scrolling features of its site ? which was not re-engineered through responsive design ? to improve the user experience on mobile, and also adapted its Facebook page and tested its email blasts to ensure they were well-suited for reading on mobile devices. The campaign is also using the hash tags #FTK, #MiracleDesigns and #HopeToIt to facilitate searching via mobile.

Ryan Reyes, age 14, of New York, was the grand-prize winner of the tissue-box design contest. He is being treated for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and designed his box featuring one of his teachers and his favorite sport, basketball. Sean Green, 12, from Stewartsville, NJ, won second prize, and Rylee Schrader, also age 12, from Lansing, MI, won third prize.

In the second year of its three-year partnership, White Cloud will donate a total of $155,000 to CMN Hospitals ? a $15,000 increase from 2013.

Mobile-friendly coupons

One of the ongoing aspects of the campaign is the distribution of mobile coupons through Facebook and other platforms. While the coupons are available digitally for consumers to download to their smartphones and tablets, White Cloud is also distributing them via email so that shoppers can print them at home.

She cited research showing that a significant number of Walmart shoppers use their mobile devices while in the store for activities such as coupon downloads, product information searches and accessing shopping lists (see story).

Social media
Walmart also promotes the campaign using its social media platforms, and the effort garnered some celebrity endorsements on Twitter as well.

Miss America 2014 Nina Davuluri, the national ambassador for Children?s Miracle Network Hospitals, has been tweeting about the campaign. She is also slated to make an in-store appearance at the Walmart store that sells the most Miracle Designs product during the campaign.

?She is very active on social media using her mobile phone, and we understand that our customers are consuming information that way as well,? Ms. Durasamy said.

In addition, former professional football quarterback Brett Favre used Twitter, Facebook and his own Web site to encourage his fans to vote for one of the contestants in the tissue-design contest. That contestant, Obi Christenson, came in fourth place overall.

?Most people interact on Twitter via mobile, so this kind of support really enriched the overall contest experience,? said Meghann Craig, a spokeswoman for White Cloud.

Final Take

Mark Hamstra is content director at Mobile Marketer. Reach him at