With beverage brands becoming more creative in their interactive marketing tactics, PepsiCo leveraged a mobile-optimized prize wheel microsite to boost customer acquisition, resulting in approximately eight percent of offers being redeemed.

PepsiCo teamed up with digital engagement platform FunMobility to roll out the microsite, which encouraged visitors to tap the prize wheel to discover their instant win prize. The beverage marketer did not seek to fuel brand engagement as a one-off strategy, instead deciding to bolster loyalty by giving each participant some form of a reward.

?PepsiCo had a long-tail vision of understanding that the value in advertising comes from long-term brand engagement that you?re driving,? said Jin Kim, director of business development at FunMobility. ?The value that digital offers is connecting that brand and owning a CRM database with which you can continually drive engagement.

?To create a marketing campaign that can really connect your brand to end-users, content today needs to be super relevant to their immediate wants and needs (search, native ads, etc.) or an experience that creates a ?moment? beyond a click or a view. Gamification offers that ?moment? for consumers by rewarding action with an incentive.?

Spinning up mobile tactics
PepsiCo opted to leverage FunMobility?s prize wheel ad unit to fuel new customer acquisition through a variety of quick service restaurant partners, such as Donny?s Pizzeria. The mobile-optimized prize wheel featured a slew of digital prizes and interactive coupons redeemable at participating retailers.

PepsiCo and FunMobility used social media advertisements to drive mobile users to the campaign nanosite. There, consumers could tap to spin the wheel and uncover their prize.

Each coupon within the wheel included location finders and animated timers, ensuring that the reward would be relevant to each individual.

Per FunMobility, the prize wheel unit sees the highest conversions out of all of its tools. Generally speaking, ninety percent of consumers who land on the microsite will opt to spin the wheel, likely due to the unit's ability to effectively showcase all available incentives.

?Incentives can be broken down into two key categories,? Mr. Kim said. ?Emotional and monetary. Emotional incentives can come in the form of recipes, ebooks, badges, points, etc., while monetary incentives can be things like BOGO offers, coupons, sweeps entries, etc.

?PepsiCo utilized a combination of things with a core call-to-action being a sweeps entry for a chance to win a gift card,? he said. ?We knew that not everyone would win a gift card though; in fact, most people won't win a gift card.

?So to ensure a positive experience, where end users will still walk away with a winning ?moment,? we added secondary prizes such as buy one get one, or money off with additional purchase.?

The PepsiCo campaign ? which included prizes such as a free drink with a food purchase ? saw an approximate redemption rate of 8 to 9 percent for the mobile coupons.

Meanwhile, 40 percent of the visitors who went to the site gave up their email addresses in order to access the special promotions, a feat which helped PepsiCo boost its CRM database.

Interactive content prowess
Implementing a limited-time prize wheel with geolocation capabilities is a smart move for any brand with national reach.

In 2014, Macy?s spring marketing campaign put a new spin on integrating mobile with an in-app game by allowing consumers to spin a flower-shaped wheel for a chance to win prizes, such as digital gift codes worth between $10 and $500 (see story).

The aspect of a guaranteed prize is enough to convince most individuals to give the prize wheel a spin.

FunMobility has also worked with a slew of other brands in creating content with a strong interactive angle.

Chiquita Bananas? FunMobility-powered campaign with Universal Pictures? Minions film resulted in a 50 percent return rate to the image recognition-enabled content, as well as a 10 percent uptick in subscriptions to the brand?s mobile-optimized newsletter (see story).

Ultimately, consumers prefer to receive valuable experiences or rewards in exchange for their engagement with a brand.

?While gamification, engagement and consumer experience are valuable and great, the end-goal of the brand is not to give away a bunch offers, but to gain audience information to utilize as a part of its long-tail strategy: personalization, segmentation, etc.,? Mr. Kim said.

?Think of it as a bartering system, where brands are bartering with consumers for a piece of their information. The higher the value of the offer, the more information we can request.?