Retail advertising is the engine of newspaper revenue. Of the $13,356.2 billion spend on national and retail advertising in Q’3 2009, 77% came from retail. As retailers and newspapers continue to test new ways to engage shoppers, flyers are and will remain an connection bewteen retailers and their customers.
According to Matthew Tilley, COO of Inmar quoted in the January 26th edition of Internet Retailer “newspaper inserts still account for 89% of coupons distributed to consumers and more than half of coupon redemption” . Tilley also points out that consumer coupon redemption grew by 27% between 2008 and 2009.
As mobile publishers, we are aware of the increasing importance consumers place on their smarphones as a source of price intelligence. A recent study from Compete demonstrates how smartphone users in general, iPhone users in particlular, have made mobile device an essential part of their shopping activity.
Mobile users are now able to access retail price information on their smartphones because of the increase in the number of retailers that have mobilized their weekly inserts/circulars. Virtually every major American retailer now distributes their weekly Free Standing Inserts (FSI’s) on mobile devises. Retailers continue to expand their use of mobile to engage their consumers and to distribute feature pricing information and mobile coupons. Retailers as diverse as Armani and A&P have add mobility to their marketing communications activity. Very recent examples of the expanding role mobile plays in retailer’s include Valpak’s mobilization of the 17,000 coupons in their vehicle. Verizon has made their SpendSmart digital coupon product available to their mobile sunscribers. Safeway has joined Cellfire to allow loyalty club members to download coupons to their mobile.
The mobilization of retail flyers/ circulars and coupons respond to a very clear demand from consumers for mobile price intelligence.
We believe that we are still in the early stages of the mobilization of retail. As more consumers purchase smart phones we will see a dramatic increase in their reliance on their mobile phones for price intelligence and product discovery. Retailers will need to respond to consumer demand for price intelligence with applications of their own and with smart ad placements across mobile applications. Spreed has been following this development – we know that it is vitally important to our newspaper publishing partners because inserts deliver significant ad revenue. We have built FSI capability into our mobile application platform. We call this solution mFlyers. It has been built to allow publishers to easily sell retail based insert space in their mobile applications. We we will be showing off this functionality very shortly in our blog and on our applications. Keep your eyes peeled for more information soon.
