• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, August 19, 2014

Speaking at a Mobile Insider Summit panel on beacons, Jeff Jensen of inMarket discussed results from a test the beacon ad network ran on behalf of Hillshire Farms among 25,000 shoppers increased interaction with the brand 19 times for those exposed to messages sent from beacons in grocery stores. The frequency of the app used in the test went up 16 times, while the life of the Hillshire app for those shoppers increased six-fold, according to Jensen. The campaign targeted the launch of Hillshire’s new American Craft sausage links. 

Patrick Moorhead, VP, mobile brand development at Catalina, however, expressed skepticism about the use of beacons in grocery stores versus retail stores because the latter have an average of 36,000 SKUs, making it difficult to target offers. “If you check in to Victoria’s Secret, I’m pretty sure I know what you’re going to do there…buy underwear. By contrast, a grocery store shopper could be looking to buy anything from a rotisserie chicken to bleach. He also suggested supermarket owners were among businesses slowest to adopt new technologies and operations.