They’re leveraging mobile to reach specific target audiences with the right message at the right time.

Once considered a cautious adopter of mobile advertising, major CPG brands have picked up the pace and increased their mobile ad spend by 175% last year, according to a recent article in Mobile Marketer.

CPG brands have historically relied on mass-marketing tactics, said the article, but many are turning to mobile to target specific groups of consumers based on their purchase history. Their goal is to influence image-cpg-mobile-growth-230buying decisions by delivering tailored mobile messages to the right consumers at the right time, whether they’re in a store or couch-shopping at home.

“We’ve seen significant growth in mobile advertising among the CPG brands we work with,” said Elisabeth Payne, Mobile Sales Director for Yahoo’s CPG/Health team that has accounts including Purina, Kraft, General Mills, and ConAgra. “They love that we can precisely target the right consumers and measure the actual lift in offline sales that comes from both PC and mobile advertising.”

Yahoo’s huge pool of 800 million registered users, including more than 100 million mobile users, is a major advantage in targeting and measuring results across PCs, tablets, and smartphones, said Payne. The crucial difference is that Yahoo can target individual people in its vast user base, while ad networks rely on targeting devices.

“We know what our users really care about, based on data like the content they’re viewing and the terms they’re searching on,” she said. “For example, we can find users who are showing interest in buying a dog, and then advise one of our accounts to get their messages in front of these consumers.” Yahoo also works with partners like Nielsen Catalina and Datalogix to further refine targeting with purchase history data and measure the impact that online marketing has on offline sales, she said.

Payne’s team used this approach on a recent mobile campaign for a popular CPG brand that produced a short-term sales impact of $1.6 million with a five-fold improvement in sales ROI. Marketing across screens typically accelerates results, she says, citing Yahoo research that shows that users exposed to both mobile and PC ads were 9% more likely to convert than users who saw only PC ads.

For more information on how to leverage Yahoo Mobile solutions for your brand, please contact your Yahoo Account Representative.