Coke's Mobile Director: We Lack Great Apps

Coke has been lauded for its social media marketing prowess, particularly with its Facebook and Twitter presences where the brand seems to brightly resonate. When it comes to mobile apps, though, mobile and search director Tom Daly said the company has fallen short.

“We have dozens of apps,” he said. “And I can tell you as a guy ultimately responsible, we don’t have any that are great. We don’t have any that are really connecting with consumers. We are not doing a good job of marketing them…We build [an app] and then we kind of move on as opposed to paying attention to making it do the work it’s designed to do.”

Daly made the comments while moderating a mobile marketing panel at ad:tech New York on Thursday. He was attempting to inject a little hard-boiled honesty into a program that mostly included vendors and brands showing only their best work.

For instance, Russell Wallach, president of music marketer Live Nation Network, said his company’s mobile app has drawn more sponsorship interest. He said crowdsourcing campaigns have made the app highly engaged with concertgoers.

“Brands are actually coming to us and asking, ‘Hey, how can we integrate at the show? How can we leverage that experience?'” Wallach said. “We hope to create more [marketing] opportunities that enhance the [user] experience at the show.”

Later, the company president said, “For us, enhanced experience actually drives revenue. It will drive more ticket sales. It will drive more merchandise sales. It will drive more concession sales. By doing those things, [music] fans are telling us, ‘We are thrilled to be a part of it.'”

Iryna Newman, Groupon head of mobile, provided insights on how the six-month-old GrouponNow is performing, suggesting the app’s users are very good when it comes to sales conversions. In other words, her Chicago-based company’s sales data appears to jibe with the superb average order sizes that Radio Shack has been seeing with Foursquare app users.

“When we first started testing, we saw very quickly that users were engaged,” Newman said, “and they do not shy away from buying on mobile.”

Doug Stovall, SVP at mobile marketing services firm Hipcricket, shared an example in which his team helped geofence 28 U.S. airports in a campaign for MillerCoors product Blue Moon. It included push notifications for consumers who had opted in to the messages.

“So if you arrive at O’Hare, you can get a message saying, ‘There are five restaurants at O’Hare where you can get a Blue Moon beer,” Stovall said. “It was a successful program.”