Street Fight Daily: Consumers Crave Transparency from Brands, Retailers Are Figuring It Out

TODAY IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING

Report: Consumers Seek Transparency From Brands on Social Media (Street Fight)
In surveying 1,000 U.S. consumers, the social media management platform Sprout Social found that 86% believe transparency from businesses is more important now than ever before, and more than half say they want brands to be more transparent on social media.

What Do You Know, Retailers Are Figuring It Out (Bloomberg)
The clearest signs of strength have come from the big-box category, where Walmart Inc. posted its best comparable sales growth in more than a decade and Target Corp. roaredwith its biggest increase on this metric in more than 13 years. Those two, though, didn’t have a monopoly on the retail cheer. MediaPost: AR, robots make their way into retail

Billy Penn, Denverite, and The Incline Are Going After Members (Nieman Lab)
It’s a member, it’s a contributor, it’s a customer—no, it’s that saintly reader whose main interest is supporting these local news sites and keeping the journalism free to read for others who can’t afford it.

Mobile Advertisers, Don’t Be Fooled By Claims About ‘Precise’ Data (Street Fight)
Jake Moskowitz: When selecting data for mobile campaigns, don’t base your decision solely on claims about precision or how many decimal places appear in the coordinates, and definitely don’t mistake precision for accuracy. Precision is important, but the value of precision hinges on data accuracy.

MEDIAVINE, CMPS, AND IN-HOUSE MARKETING

CMPs Bring Up CPMs: Mediavine Study Finds 52% Increase (AdExchanger)
Publishers who use a consent management platform (CMP) saw CPMs rise 9% and fill rates go up 5% post-GDPR, according to analysis of publishers using Mediavine, which manages ads for thousands of sites.

Some Companies Backtrack on Taking Marketing In-House (Digiday)
Some advertisers are going back to media agencies and ad tech vendors after struggling to run those services themselves. The reasons vary but tend to hinge on the difficulty in recruiting qualified personnel, which can be turned off from working for a single company and not having exposure to various marketing facets that will help their careers.

HANGING ON AT THE TOP

Facebook Is Tops With Everyone But Teens (eMarketer)
The number of Facebook users in the US will inch up 0.9% this year to 169.5 million. While growth has plateaued, Facebook is still the most used social network among all age groups, except for teens.

Is Apple’s Soaring R&D a Sign of Good Things to Come? (Forbes)
Apple’s research and development spending has been trending higher, growing at a CAGR of about 25% between FY’14 and FY’17. That said, the higher R&D spending isn’t exactly translating into meaningfully higher profitability for the world’s most valuable company.