Nestlé USA?s Carnation Evaporated Milk is giving lovers of Latin cuisine meal preparation help with a new mobile Web site and custom iPhone application targeted at Hispanic consumers.

The mobile Web site and application draw sweet and savory recipes from the brand's http://MiCocinaLatina.com wired Web site, delivering product and brand engagement to consumers' mobile phones. Both the mobile Web site and the iPhone application present content in Spanish and English.

?MiCocinaLatina.com is Nestlé?s Carnation Evaporated Milk Hispanic Web site, and the strategy behind making it mobile and building the iPhone app was to address their Hispanic audience, which happens to be more mobile than the rest of us,? said King Hill, president of DigiKnow?s Circle 44 Mobile, Cleveland.

?If your audience is highly mobile, it makes sense to deliver content and a big recipe database through a smartphone,? he said. ?Research indicates that Hispanics are almost twice as mobile as the rest of us, and we?re providing them with Latin recipes that use Carnation Evaporated Milk they can access on their handsets.

?This is targeting Hispanics in general, skewing toward Hispanic moms?women in their early 20s to mid-fifties and on up to grandmas?people who run the kitchen.?

Nestlé S.A. claims to be the largest nutrition and foods company in the world, founded and headquartered in Vevey, Switzerland. Nestlé acquired the Carnation Co. in 1985.

DigiKnow is a digital technology, online advertising, consulting and outsourcing company. Its subsidiary Circle 44 Mobile specializes in the mobile Web, mobile applications, text messaging and mobile advertising.

Carnation Evaporated Milk goes mobile
Carnation Evaporated Milk?s Mi Cocina Latina mobile Web site offers full search capabilities of more than 300 recipes for Web-enabled phones.

The iPhone application provides similar capabilities, with a user experience optimized for the device?s touch screen.

The iPhone application also offers a twist on standard recipe search: with a shake of the iPhone, the user can generate a random recipe.

The shake feature of the iPhone application is a visual and tactile extension of the actual Carnation Evaporated Milk can, which consumers also shake before using its contents in their cooking.

?When you buy evaporated milk in a can, you have to shake it, so building an app that you have to shake is consistent with the actual product,? Mr. Hill said. ?It produces a random recipe when you shake, or you can also search the database.

?It is an opportunity to reach Hispanic consumers with a high-engagement application that mimics the actually product.?

Hispanics over-index for mobile adoption
According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in 2009 more than 47 percent of Hispanics used a handheld device to go online, compared to 28 percent of Caucasians.

Carnation brand managers implemented the mobile program to respond to this trend and to put recipes in consumers' hands, where they could more likely use them at the point of purchase.

Carnation branding is heavily integrated into the iPhone application and the mobile site.

Nestlé is promoting the Carnation Evaporated Milk mobile properties on the MiCocinaLatina.com Web site.

The brand is also running mobile banners and mobile search ads in both Spanish and English to drive adoption of the iPhone application and mobile site.

?We?re driving people to a landing page that alerts people to the availability of the mobile site and directs people to iTunes to get the app,? Mr. Hill said. ?We?re using AdMob for mobile ads and we?re using Google for local display search, mobile display and mobile text search.

?We also have a pretty substantial database of registered users that get emails alerting them to the new mobile capabilities,? he said.