In the day’s final presentation, Jose Puente, director, product strategy, at AutoTrader, talks about how the company leverage mobile for its Hispanic customers via its Spanish-language AutoTrader Latino offering. Given that the Latino audience typically over-indexes on mobile, the company launched text messaging, iPhone and Android apps, and an Augmented Reality 2D code, among other facets including Facebook to better reach the target audience. Text messages from codes placed in the print AutoTrader Latino magazine sent people to the companion Web site. We notified dealers when an anonymous user had texted in about a car from their dealership to respond …

It looks like Autotrader has been successful in making its conversion to mobile, according to Director of Product Strategy-Mobile/Affinity Brands Jose Puente. Currently, about "45% of all our activity comes in from mobile," he told Mobile Insider Summit attendees. Presumably, he meant "mobile" mobile, not magazine mobile (see earlier post), but he did note that magazines are playing an important role in even that mix.

Everyone love to knock Craigslist for disintermediating the newspaper classified business, but according to Jose Puente, director of product strategy- mobile/affinity brands, Autotrader.com they were their first. Speaking at MediaPost's Mobile Insider Summit in Key Largo this morning, Puente reminder attendees that Autotrader began as a print medium by "a guy" who thought newspapers were an inefficient way to service the marketplace of people looking to buy and sell cars. So he created a magazine to focus on that, and "got rid of the rest of the newspaper."

Sapient's Dan Israel says retailers are grappling with living in the era of radical price transparency because of the ease of making price comparisons via mobile. "Retailers no longer have the home field advantage in their own stores," he said. That means they have to try to engage customers on an ongoing basis, before during and after they leave the store. In that vein, Ashley Harmeling of retailer Rue La La says the company tries to keep customers engaged with its app whlle in the store waiting online, or any where else they might need to kill time. But israel …

The holiday season already seems a distant memory here in hot, humid Florida, but the second Summit panel on Friday focuses on mobile results from the year-end shopping biitz. One clear theme is that tablets are for e-commerce buying and smartphones are for browsing. Sheila Collins, who head consumer digital marketing at American Express said customers using tablets spend 20% to 30% more than those using other devices. Similarly, Dan Israel, who leads mobile practice for Sapient Nitro, noted about 24% of all consumer throught the phone was a useful tool for shopping. Forsmarpthone owners, that figure rose to 38%; …

What were results of the Snowball Effect campaign? Coke’s Anders Pers, isn’t sharing details but says the program drove a lot of traffic to 7-11 and is the most successful campaign its ever run with 7-11. The store chain got people to  buy more and and more often. He also said the program had 99% activation across 7-11’s more than 6,000 outlets. “That’s almost unheard of for us,” said Pers. “So for us this has really been great and great for relationship with 7/11.” He created Leo Burnett’s Arc unit with playing a very big role in the effort. “The …

Switching to big brands, Coca-Cola takes center stage to explain how it teamed up with 7-Eleven to create in-store programs reach millennials with via mobile devices. The beverage giant’s Anders Pers starts by cracking open a Coke to prove he actually eats his own dog food, so to speak. He brings a gust of cold air to balmy Florida by showing slids and discussing Coke’s “Arctic Home” campaign with the World Wildlife Fund to help save the polar bear. Coke approached 7-Eleven about extending “Arctic Home’ to convenience store chain. Molly Garris, mobile lead at Arc Worldwide, which worked with …

Field Harriosn and co-panelist Mike Broder, president of Florida SuperCon, say national brands don’t what it’s like to function in a byper-local environment. Broder explained that an unnamed national agency pushing a competing local comic book event threatened to put him out of business with a big campaign. But SuperCon managed to easily outdraw the interloper, he believes, b/c the national agency wasn’t as plugged into the local market. So how can national media companies or agencies play at the local level? Have custom tailored creative—the closer you can get to making something personalized and relevant, the better the click-through …

The first panel of the day, continuing the focus on local mobile, features what may be the first dentist-panelist in the history of MediaPost events--and that's a lot of events. Local Fla. dentist Field Harrison explained that one of his patients worked at Pandora and turned him into an audio advertiser on the online radio service. Fellow panelist Kim Lueger, dir. of mobile and emerging media, at Pandora, explained Field used click to call to make appoints in locally targeted ads. Field says all he listens to himself is Pandora and wound up hearing his own ad all the time …

The day's second presentation looked at how Applebee’s turned to mobile marketing and QR codes to boost its lunch business. Keynoter Ana Maldonado-Coomer, head of mobile for Applebee’s owner Thomas & King explained that rise of mobile interaction underpinned the program it developed for Applebees. Reserarch showed people wanted to sit down for lunch but only spend about a half hour eating and getting back to work, so the co. developed campaign around 14 minute lunches. The target audience skewed young, into pop culture shows like Glee and The Office, and games like Angry Birds. So entertainment was a big …