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ARS Advertising and the 2011 Amana brand campaign took home what is arguably one of the biggest wins at the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association (CIMA) awards. Voted as Best Cross Media Campaign, it took a simple idea and made a big impact in a city known to be a hotbed for interactive innovation.

Cross Media Marketing is a concept that’s still evolving. Yet, Amana brand and partner ARS Advertising & Interactive took the initiative to define what this concept can be and created a set of tactics that tells a story. By capitalizing on the capabilities of point-of-sale, mobile, apps and online media, the partners found an opportunity to change the way people shop for appliances.

The story starts in-store with point-of-sale signage placed next to Amana appliances, which are a gateway to the mobile campaign. By using QR codes to engage customers, shoppers are served up short, fun videos featuring comedians talking about Amana® appliances. They are also directed to our “Help Me Choose” experience—an app, mobile, and online tool that makes looking and shopping for appliances fun, and more importantly, simple.

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Today, retailers have already begun to adjust to the emergence of mobile shopping. The mobile retail market is predicted to see an annual growth of 24% over the next four years, reaching $12 billion in 2014. This also includes an industry shift in the production and shipping of more smartphones than traditional cellular phones. So what’s your mobile strategy?

On January 10th and 11th at the NRF Big Show, ARS Interactive and CellPoint Mobile will be unveiling the only fully integrated mobile retail shopping solution available in the United States.

The partnership brings together ARS’s over 30 years of retail eCommerce shopping experience, together with CellPoint Mobile’s industry-leading enterprise mobile solutions. CellPoint Mobile is also the architect of the National Retail Federation Mobile Commerce Blueprint.

ARS Mobile powered by CellPoint will be the only fully integrated mobile retail shopping solution in the United States that combines product information, coupons, customer loyalty and mobile payment into one experience. This will give customers complete shopping control directly from their mobile phones, while providing retailers with a constant customer touch-point inside and outside the store.

The major breakthrough in the ARS Mobile solution is mobile payment. Currently, it is offered through a secure, PCI DSS compliant, web-based program interface that can use both 1-click remote payment and proximity mobile payment. This classifies ARS Interactive and CellPoint Mobile as one of the first companies in the United States to offer Near Field Communication (NFC) based mobile payment. This allows customers to “tap-and-pay” at the register through their mobile phone wallet, once NFC technology is adopted universally in the United States.

Where’s your retail business at when it comes to mobile shopping? Join ARS for the NRF Show in New York at booth 3251 in the Mobile Pavilion for a live demonstration. Get full details

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The runway better get wider because here comes Kmart. With a new line of trendy, fashion-forward apparel launching this fall, Kmart challenged ARS to develop an interactive shopping experience to complement their upcoming direct mail launch. We simply replied – it’s a walk-off!

Based on Kmart’s “It’s True” fashion campaign, we went to work on some fierce new looks that rocked the Internet. The grand finale broke the shopping mold with a Flash experience that moved users through the new Kmart fashion styles with an animated black ribbon. Add edgy copy and contemporary photography, the site embodies the future of Kmart fashion. It gives shoppers the glamorous feeling of being “on set” with an opportunity to view a behind-the-scenes video of Kmart’s “It’s More” photo shoot.

See it for yourself. Click Here

“Holy awesome, Batman!” As you can imagine, we were pretty geeked when ARS was asked to partner with DC Comics to create an online shopping experience celebrating their 75th anniversary on Kmart.com.

Our creatives were flying around the office. Leaping chairs in a single bound. Knocking out ideas left and right. And when all the “BOOMS” “WHACKS” and “POWS” settled, ARS developed a Flash experience that paid homage to the superheroes everyone knows and loves, while promoting Kmart’s back-to-school campaign. From a fan-centric trivia quiz to historical comic tidbits to a blockbuster back-to-school shopping page, DC Comics and Kmart both needed their own thought bubbles because they were speechless. “Wow!”

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