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Burger King's self-serve ads set stage for bigger mobile commitment

Five Burger King locations are serving as the testing ground for a new self-serve mobile ad platform enabling the brand to create, deploy and measure geotargeted rich media mobile ads by itself.

Marketers typically work with multiple vendors to place mobile ads but by streamlining the process, this could help shift bigger budgets toward mobile. The Burger King ads are being delivered within a one-mile geofence surrounding the five locations and include a coupon that users can engage with and save to their devices without having to leave the content they are viewing.

?Typically, brands have to go to one company to create the banner ads,? said Stefan Brown, mobile solutions engineer at FunMobility Inc. ? Then, they have go to another company to take out the placement of those ads and then come to a company such as FunMobility to put in content that can tie down to point of sale inside of those ads.

?Brands can now actually take the placement of these engagements in their own hands, where they can choose where they display them on the premium network, whatever site they would like to display them on, and the creation is easy and simple,? he said. ?They can go ahead and complete the A/B testing, take out the banner ad and deploy it as they like.?

Streamlining the ad workflow
A market pilot for the FunMobility platform is currently underway with Burger King that will A/B test the impact of the new ads versus traditional mobile banner ads using comparable creative, offers and audience targeting.

The banner ads, which promote the chain's breakfast menu, are placed on premium sites such as Pandora within one mile of the five test locations and include a coupon. Users can click on the coupon to save it to their device or Passbook and see where the nearest location is that they can redeem the offer.

The ads are created on FunMobility?s Mobile Engagement Platform, which promises to streamline the existing mobile ad workflow into a single process of designing, publishing, A/B testing and updating campaigns in real-time.

The platform also includes built-in audience targeting capabilities.

The entire ad unit exists as an overlay on top of the site or app being browsed; meaning that clicking an ad does not redirect customers away from the content they are viewing.

Upping the ante
The effort is the latest example of how Burger King continues to ante up in mobile marketing.

Earlier this year, Burger King made a significant commitment with a new digital platform that will enable it to quickly scale up with mobile offers, payments, order-ahead and other features (see story).

The chain also unveiled plans for an in-store Wi-Fi upgrade to create better in-restaurant experiences (see story).

?What FunMobility brought to the table is an engagement platform that allows the marketer to not only create the engagement, the promotions and coupons inside of the banner, but we also allow them to create the banner ads themselves,? Mr. Brown said. ?Also allowing to decide the location where they want to deliver the ads and also the analytics.

?A marketer of any talent can really get in there, play around with the experience, built it out and deploy it,? he said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York