Happy Returns Expands Into College Market
Startup Happy Returns, based in Santa Monica and founded by alums from HauteLook and NordstromRack.com, offers a way for shoppers to return e-commerce purchases at real-world kiosks. Beginning this fall, Happy Returns will be setting up kiosks—which it calls “Return Bars”—at five campuses around the country to capitalize on the returns generated by back-to-college online shopping.
As Local Search Enters the Voice Era, Three Content Channels Dominate
You’re well covered today on the three top voice platforms if you have strong listings on Google, Apple, and Yelp. If you want to do even more, make sure your Bing listings are up to date for Cortana (note that Yelp reviews show up here as well), and submit your listing info to Here and Foursquare in order to be found in Samsung’s Bixby interface.
Local News Publishers Still Mired in Ad Fraud, New Pixalate Data Shows
According to new research from Pixalate, a cross-channel fraud intelligence company that works with brands and platforms to prevent ad fraud and improve ad inventory quality, about a quarter of all smartphone app video and smartphone app display activity is “invalid traffic” (the technical term for what is largely fraud).
Indi Tackles Inauthenticity in Influencer Marketing Space
Consumers have grown weary of synchronized sponsored content flooding their Instagram feeds, and brands are being inundated by requests for freebies from self-proclaimed social media stars. That evolution in the influencer marketing space has created an opening that Indi CEO and founder Neel Grover believes his new platform can fill.
Will Apple Help Assemble the ‘Internet of Places’?
The AR cloud is the missing piece in the vision we all have for how AR should work. It’s the spatial map of the world that will let AR devices understand their surroundings. Taking this into account, the news that Apple is collecting its own data for Apple Maps may have implications for AR.
Drift Releases New Tech to Help B2B Marketers Convert Site Visitors Into Leads
It’s 2018, and if visitors to your site are slapped with forms that need to be filled out manually, those visitors are going to take their business elsewhere. That’s the state of affairs that conversational marketing and sales platform Drift is addressing this week with its new technology, Drift Intel.
Survey: Identifying Best Practices in Reputation and Review Management
Multi-location brands that use reputation and review management to manage local marketing and advertising are more likely to say that their marketing efforts are effective, according to Street Fight’s latest survey. Analysis of the survey identified several related strategies that correlated strongly with marketing effectiveness, including trying to respond to every review and working with a reputation specialist with its own technology.