For Dr Pepper Snapple Group?s recent endeavor to boost its multichannel strategy, the beverage company bet on programmatic mobile ads that helped drive 213,000 in-store visits to more than 1,000 grocery store locations and placed its products in 25,000 new households.

Through programmatic ad platform Rocket Fuel and digital ad calculator Placed, Dr Pepper was able to execute and measure its combined mobile and in-store activation efforts. Multichannel initiatives are becoming crucial for food and beverage brands such as Dr Pepper to propel their products into the future, where mobile is likely to reign in driving in-store activations.

?We engaged Rocket Fuel to increase foot traffic and the purchase frequency of Dr Pepper at more than 1,000 grocery store locations,? said Sheila Bonner, vice president of shopper marketing at Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Inc., Dallas. ?Rocket Fuel succeeded in driving 213,000 store visits at a cost of only $0.21 per visit. 

?And, as a part of the broader promotional effort, we introduced 25,000 new households to Dr Pepper products,? she said. ?This was our first foray into using Local Lift as an in-store purchase-intent driver, and Rocket Fuel went well beyond our expectations and those of our retail partner.?

Local Lift capitalizes on Rocket Fuel?s scale of more than one trillion monthly global mobile opportunities with 593 billion of those in the U.S. to reach the right audience with the highest visit intent. 

Location data availability is growing, according to Rocket Fuel.

The programmatic platform sees 40 percent of bid requests in the U.S. Advertisers that leverage location-specific rich media units, such as Tap-to-Locate, which deliver a customized map of the closest advertised locations, are experiencing even greater campaign success.

These ad units allow Rocket Fuel to optimize for engagement, which is more predictive of store visitation than a click. 

Local Lift is designed to work across a multitude of verticals and applications, including CPG brands, QSR?s, retail, shopper marketing and travel sectors.

?Rocket Fuel?s new Local Lift offering allows retailers, for the first time, to track a meaningful mobile marketing metric that connects directly to their business' bottom line,? said Mark Prior, vice president of mobile and international at Rocket Fuel, San Francisco. ?We expect the availability of store visit attribution to bring a lot of sidelined marketing dollars into the mobile space. 

?Now, optimizing by clicks is replaced by the ability to measure incremental in-store visits, pushing the envelope in how marketers think of geo-targeting,? he said.

As part of the launch, Rocket Fuel partnered with Placed, a provider of in-store attribution, to enable advertisers such as Dr Pepper to measure the direct impact of mobile ad spend in driving real-world actions. 

As measured by Placed?s attribution, Rocket Fuel?s geo-targeted campaigns average lift rate was 41.34 percent in 2014. 

Rocket Fuel has driven a $0.57 average cost per store visit for bricks-and-mortar locations, showing that retailers can recoup their marketing investment during the consumer?s first visit, realizing immediate positive ROI.

?Rocket Fuel consistently delivers results to advertisers at low cost per store visit with measurable lift,? said David Shim, founder and CEO of Placed, Seattle. ?Rocket Fuel?s success in driving incremental visits and in-store foot traffic is not limited to a single vertical or advertiser. 

?They have regularly returned strong results in the food and beverage, travel, home improvement and retail verticals,? he said. ?Recently Rocket Fuel ran one of the better performing campaign we?d seen in the QSR category, where they were able to reach consumers visiting a specific group of stores for a national advertiser.?