Managing local-social advertising for a multi-location retailer is complicated on a good day. During lockdowns, that complexity has risen exponentially.
JOANN (the crafty fabric store), works with Tiger Pistol to manage this complexity. The two companies have also demonstrated how a commercial platform can pivot to support a cause-driven program.
JOANN leveraged the same local-social ad platform to manage Make to Give, a program that contributes supplies and supports craftspeople fashioning protective gear for front-line workers at local healthcare facilities.
The way this works is, the Tiger Pistol platform lets JOANN deploy and update ads based on the status of each store. It adapts based on whether a store is open for business, offering curbside or in-store pickup, or only offering ship-to-home service.
The retailer can group campaigns by county, state, or city, based on local government orders. JOANN has the ability to change or pause these campaign groups in minutes.
Within a few months, the program produced more than 150 million masks. This was through a combination of customer purchases and directly donated masks and other protective gear to health-care facilities nationwide. JOANN has shifted its focus to supplying masks for consumers.
Lockdown Complexity
The Tiger Pistol platform enables brands to adapt their strategies to individual store openings and closings.
The uneven patchwork of lockdown orders has made life complicated for retailers. Government lockdown orders lift in some areas but not others. COVID-19 still looms and contact tracing is ramping up.
Retailers still need a way to rapidly change store status within their advertisements. For example: open for business; closed with only online ordering or curbside pickup; closed for a couple of days due to cleaning.
“Brands today, unlike before the pandemic, have a need to pivot quickly,” Talia Wachtel, TigerPistol’s VP Client Management, told Localogy Insider.
“Foot traffic can no longer serve as a blanket objective with the wide disparity among location operations. Our technology uniquely allows JOANN to not only pivot its messaging, but enables rapid ad optimization to align to the current consumer climate. Facebook is a powerful tool. By adding Tiger Pistol’s technology, JOANN is able to power what would otherwise be a tremendous manual effort in just a few clicks.”
