Mondelēz International, the maker of iconic brands including Cadbury Dairy Milk and Philadelphia cream cheese, recently announced the Australian launch of its breakthrough mobile marketing initiative, Mobile Futures.
The initiative, launched last year in the US and Brazil, aims to ignite the company’s consumer connections by collaborating with some of the brightest and most innovative minds in the mobile space – start-up entrepreneurs.
Discussing why this Mobile Futures program is relevant to Australia right now, Bonin Bough, Vice President of Global Media and Consumer Engagement at Mondelēz International told Anthill, “Around half of Australian consumers’ online activity occurs via mobile or tablet devices, but there’s a big gap between that mobile usage and where companies are investing their ad budgets.”
“Digitally savvy markets like Australia will play a lead role in our plan to invest 10 percent of our global marketing budget in clever and engaging mobile activations that span the entire consumer journey. Our goal is to become one of the top mobile marketers in the world, and Mobile Futures is one very exciting program that will help us get there,” he added.
How will Mobile Futures work?
The program is all about embracing the start-up entrepreneurial spirit.
Five of Australia’s biggest and most loved brands – Cadbury Dairy Milk, Marvellous Creations, Cadbury Favourites, Philadelphia cream cheese and belVita breakfast biscuits – will be paired with five start-ups to accelerate existing mobile innovations in just 90 days.
Selected start-ups will work one-on-one with the five brands to customise and accelerate their mobile platforms, and activate pilots within a period of 90 days.
Brands will start by spending one week working side-by-side with their start-ups and the start-up’s headquarters, immersing the company’s marketers into start-up culture.
How do the start-ups stand to gain from Mobile Futures?
Mondelēz will fund a pilot mobile platform with each of the chosen start-ups that will help grow their existing business. They will also have direct access to the Mondelēz brands, these brands’ marketers have in-depth consumer insights, which the start-ups can leverage for their businesses.
Bough also revealed that the start-ups will be introduced to Mondelēz’s many partners including Evol8tion, Facebook, Carat, Pollenizer, LBMA, Hub Australia, MMA, BlueChilli, TechBeach Manly, Spacecubed, Startmate and ATP Innovations, Inspire9 and Angelcube.
How do the brands stand to gain from Mobile Futures?
Bough told Anthill that the program will further drive innovation within Mondelēz and create a culture of “intrapreneurship”, out of which new, innovative ideas will emerge.
“Our brand teams and employees will also walk away from this experience with a new understanding of what drives innovation, and with the values that so many successful start-ups embrace – urgency, tenacity, collaboration, the willingness to take risks,” he said.
“We will be adapting our daily marketing responsibilities to be more entrepreneurial – resulting in better, faster, and more efficient decisions for our brands,” he added.
In the US, two new start-ups have emerged out of the Mobile Futures program there.
One is Prankstr, which offers a turnkey way for consumers to prank their friends! The other, BetaBox, is a new way to distribute samples; it is a network across ecommerce platforms to hyper-target product sampling.
Applications will close on 1 June 2014 so you better hurry up.
