As Voice Gets Established, Brands Grapple with Implementation

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Consumer demand for voice technology has never been greater, and industry heavyweights like Google and Amazon are gearing up for a platform war as they work to integrate voice assistants into virtually every area of the connected consumer’s life. But behind the scenes, many brand marketers are struggling to connect the dots and design campaigns around a technology they don’t fully understand.

online privacy

Apple Takes Advantage of Facebook’s Foul Play to Make a Privacy Statement

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Not only did Facebook’s “Research” app, which paid 13- to 35-year-old users $20/month to access their search history, emails, and private messages, set off every imaginable alarm on the this-will-look-bad-when-the-exposé-comes-out PR radar (one of the world’s most powerful corporations must be lacking one of those), but the app also blatantly violated the terms of Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program, which proscribes distributing apps to consumers. It probably didn’t help that Facebook was searching tweens’ data for dirt on its competitors. 

Privacy, Poor Management, and Sex Scandals Can’t Touch the Duopoly’s Ad Growth—Yet

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It will likely take a significant downturn in spending or overall economic well-being for Big Tech to feel some major financial pain. And while great for Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, that’s got to be concerning for industry watchdogs wondering whether these businesses are too entrenched in digital search, advertising, and commerce to be challenged—because the past year was not hot for Silicon Valley, and yet the presses keep printing dollars.

Building the Location Layer: A Conversation with Foursquare

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Last week, location technology company Foursquare announced its new Pinpoint audience segments product. Building from its large corpus of data on places, spatial movements and behavioral patterns, Pinpoint represents the latest in Foursquare’s evolution as the “location layer,” for the internet. We got the chance to sit down with Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck in San Francisco to find out more. Here is the full interview. 

Williams-Sonoma Sues Amazon, Underscoring War Over E-Commerce Monopolization

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Foreshadowing a battle over Amazon’s overwhelming control of e-commerce, Williams-Sonoma filed a lawsuit against Amazon in the final days of 2018, charging that the retail juggernaut used its market power to copy the furniture maker’s products and squeeze it out of the market.

Choice: The Ingredient That Drives Higher Mobile Engagement Across All Marketing Use Cases

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Dan Slavin: To appeal to all consumers, you must use a mix of mobile channels, such as text, mobile wallet, and apps. Your consumers have a specific preference when it comes to receiving retailer promotional messages. Your mobile marketing strategy must cater to this preference.

Inform Your Multichannel Customer Experience Strategy

Facebook to Integrate Technical Infrastructure of WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger

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While the move indeed indicates that Facebook’s chief executives are looking to centralize acquired properties that once operated with relative autonomy, the integration also marks a response to growing concerns over user privacy. Under this new technical configuration, all the messaging platforms will be endowed with end-to-end encryption, warding off the possibility that people other than those taking part in conversations will ever read messages sent on the platforms.

How 6 Brands Are Using AR to Drive Experience Marketing

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Worldwide spending on AR is expected to reach $215 billion by 2021, as new hardware ships and AR moves further into the mainstream. Acceleration in the AR market is also being boosted by brands’ growing frustration over the limitations in display advertising. With AR, brands can bypass ad blockers and unleash their creativity in a bid to capture the attention of consumers. Let’s take a look at how six top brands are using AR for experience marketing right now.

Google Is Increasingly Taking the Reins in Managing Campaigns for Advertisers

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Boosting its appeal beyond the reams of consumer data and stranglehold on search that make its digital advertising business the most expansive in the world, Google is increasingly executing campaigns for advertisers, deploying both automation and its own ad experts to get the job done.

New Hires at Uberall, MightyHive, Dream Local

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Every two weeks, our jobs columnist Geoff Michener provides a roundup of the latest hires in the digital marketing and media ecosystems. This week’s edition also includes new hires at Motive, JumpCrew, L’Oréal, and Pubmatic.

LBMA Vidcast: Postmates Locks Down $100M, Walgreens Hooks Up With Microsoft

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On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Coty’s AR smart mirror for hair, JDA + InContext for in-store ops, Postmates gets $100M, Safegraph launches IP-to-Place, Germany says no to Amazon Dash, Walgreens partners with Microsoft.

Omnichannel Optimization: What’s Changing (and What Isn’t) in Post-Screen Search

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For brand marketers, addressing the expansion of local search into voice and visual contexts is really a matter of digging in and getting more involved with rich local context that appears to grow more expansive by the day. Google alone has introduced a vast array of opportunities for business to differentiate themselves from the competition, including photos, videos, 360° virtual tours, business descriptions, menus, Posts, reviews, and several other features.

What Standard Cognition’s Big Play Means for Autonomous Retail

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If autonomous checkout systems ever go mainstream, it will be because retailers finally figured out how to effectively harness in-store cameras to determine where customers are and what items they’re holding in real-time. Reaching that goal has proven elusive to AI technology providers thus far, but a San Francisco-based startup called Standard Cognition is hoping that its recent acquisition of Explorer.ai, a mapping and computer vision firm, will be the catalyst that’s necessary to accelerate growth and expand into new retail verticals.

Heard on the Street, Episode 19: Fusing the Best of Online and Offline Shopping, with Trevor Sumner

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We’ve been hearing a lot about “retailpocolypse,” which raises the question of what 2019 has in store for retail (excuse the pun). This question threaded the many topics we batted around with Perch Interactive CEO Trevor Sumner on the latest episode of Street Fight’s Heard on the Street podcast.

Privacy-Forward Search Engine DuckDuckGo Partners with Apple Maps

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Making a big splash in privacy, the ongoing story that has dominated location data-based marketing buzz in 2019, DuckDuckGo, the search engine that does not store user data in order to sell pricey ads, announced that it is using Apple’s MapKit JS to power searches. While the search engine’s results are sought out by far fewer users than search industry leader Google’s, the growth DuckDuckGo is experiencing further validates the impression the tech media has practically been screaming about this year: The winds on privacy are definitively changing, and data-driven companies that fail to heed those changes are in for quite a storm.

Foursquare Launches Self-Serve Audience Segments Accessible via The Trade Desk

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Having pivoted from a location-centric social app of sorts to a location intelligence platform, Foursquare has positioned itself well to offer brands attributable marketing success and verified data points at a time when concerns about both data quality and privacy are as widespread as ever. Foursquare says it throws out about 80% of the third-party data it consumes, an act intended to preserve the quality of its largely first-party data store.

Loyalty Solution Narvar Acquires Kronos Care, Expands in Europe

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Customer engagement and loyalty solution Narvar, which has tripled in size over the last year, announced on Tuesday its acquisition of Kronos Care, a fellow customer engagement startup founded in just 2017. The move will help Narvar conquer the European market, bolstered by the local expertise of the Paris-based Kronos.

Kroger CEO Offers Closer Look at Grocery Giant’s Tech Innovation at NRF 2019

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Among Kroger’s latest innovation is a partnership with online grocer Ocado. Kroger is licensing Ocado’s technology—the only grocer in the United States to do so—in order to benefit from its digital-native mastery of automated warehouse operations and on-demand delivery. The company will be expanding its number of warehouses powered by Ocado’s technology in 2019.

How Brands Will Select Key Partners in 2019: 5 Key Takeaways from Affiliate Summit West

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Robert Glazer: This year’s Affiliate Summit West conference took place earlier this month in Las Vegas. And just like every year, performance marketing experts gathered to see some of the potential challenges and opportunities the space is likely to see in 2019. This year’s conference gave them plenty to chew on. There were five topics, in particular, that I found to be most important. Here’s a closer look at them.

Google Appears to Test Netflix-Like Personalization Score for Local Businesses

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Just as Netflix displays match scores in the arena of entertainment, showing users a percentage indicating how likely they are to enjoy a new film or TV show, Google appears to be testing a feature that shows searchers how likely they are to enjoy a local business.