Inside the Dutch Bros National Expansion Strategy
Opening more coffee shops may be the most visible part of the Dutch Bros growth strategy. Behind the scenes, however, the company is building something just as important: the marketing infrastructure needed to acquire customers more efficiently, personalize engagement, and increase customer lifetime value. As Dutch Bros expands nationally, that infrastructure may prove to be […]
Vevo Brings Premium Music Videos to MULO Brands
Vevo is bringing its premium music videos into brick-and-mortar businesses through a new partnership with Rockbot, giving MULO brands another way to create more engaging and consistent in-store experiences For multi-location brands, the in-store experience is becoming an increasingly important competitive differentiator. While digital channels continue to dominate customer acquisition, what happens inside a physical […]
Thryv Adds Revenue Intelligence for Franchise Brands
For franchise brands, generating leads is no longer the primary challenge. The bigger opportunity is understanding why some locations consistently convert demand into revenue while others struggle despite receiving similar marketing support. That shift is reflected in Thryv’s latest integration with Breesy AI, which combines customer acquisition, engagement, and operational intelligence into a unified view […]
Customer Retention, Marketing’s Competitive Advantage
For much of the past decade, digital marketing has been dominated by customer acquisition. Brands invested heavily in paid search, social media, retail media, influencers, and performance advertising, all with the goal of finding the next customer more efficiently than their competitors. That equation is beginning to shift. As consumers discover brands through an expanding […]
Conversational Advertising Is Entering MULO Marketing
Conversational AI is rapidly becoming another place where consumers discover local businesses and the advertising infrastructure is beginning to follow. As brands prepare, the challenge is shifting from simply being recommended by AI to managing paid visibility at scale. For years, digital advertising for multi-location brands followed a familiar playbook. Consumers searched Google, clicked through […]
CTV Budgets Keep Growing, Trust Still Hasn’t Caught Up.
Connected TV has won the budget battle. Now it must win the credibility battle. As marketers demand stronger evidence of business impact, measurement, not inventory, is emerging as the industry’s next competitive battleground. New research from performance CTV platform JamLoop suggests the industry’s biggest obstacle is no longer adoption but trust. While half of marketers […]
Multi-Location Growth Is Becoming an Operating Platform
When reports surfaced that Inspire Brands had confidentially filed for an initial public offering, much of the attention focused on valuation, revenue, and the scale of a restaurant company operating more than 33,000 locations across Arby’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Dunkin’, Jimmy John’s, SONIC Drive-In, and Baskin-Robbins. The more interesting story, however, is the collection of […]
Jersey Mike’s IPO Highlights the Power of Disciplined MULO Growth
Jersey Mike’s decision to file for an initial public offering comes at a time when restaurant operators face a difficult operating environment marked by cautious consumers, higher labor costs, and slowing industry growth. Yet the sandwich chain has continued to expand its footprint while improving profitability, positioning itself as one of the restaurant industry’s strongest […]
Kroger’s Giant Eagle Deal Signals the Next Battle in Retail Media
Less than two years after regulators blocked its proposed acquisition of Albertsons, Kroger is back in the acquisition market. This time, the company is taking a smaller and more targeted approach, announcing an agreement to acquire regional grocery chain Giant Eagle in a deal valued at approximately $1.65 billion. At first glance, the transaction appears […]
Walmart’s Vibe Acquisition Shows Its Advertising Ambitions
Walmart has spent the past several years quietly building one of the most formidable advertising businesses outside of the traditional digital giants. What began as a retail media effort designed to monetize shopper data is increasingly evolving into something much larger: a full-funnel advertising ecosystem capable of competing for budgets that have historically flowed to […]
As AI Changes Local Discovery, Scorpion Bets on Scale and Technology
The future of local marketing may depend less on generating leads and more on connecting marketing activity directly to business outcomes. The Scorpion acquisition of 1SEO reflects a growing industry shift toward AI-powered platforms that help businesses compete in an increasingly complex discovery environment. Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how consumers discover, evaluate, and choose […]
Yext Wants to Be the Infrastructure Layer for Agentic Marketing
For most of the last decade, local marketing technology was built around helping brands rank in search engines. That model is beginning to change as AI-powered search experiences, agentic marketing, recommendation engines, and conversational assistants play a larger role in how consumers discover and evaluate businesses. According to Yext’s recent Consumer Search Behaviors report, 28% […]
Basis and Cint Want Brand Metrics to Matter Before Campaigns End
Digital advertising has long operated with two separate measurement systems. On one side sit performance metrics such as clicks, conversions, cost per acquisition (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS). These indicators provide near real-time visibility into campaign activity and allow marketers to optimize media while campaigns are running. On the other side are brand […]
The Goddard School Is Changing How Franchise Marketing Gets Done
Growth creates a unique challenge for franchise organizations. Every new location expands revenue opportunities, but it also adds complexity. More locations mean more local marketing channels to manage, more reviews to monitor, more business listings to maintain, and more customer interactions that require attention. At a certain point, growth itself begins to change how marketing […]
What Yelp’s Fastest-Growing Brands Reveal About Consumer Behavior
Every year, lists of the fastest-growing brands offer more than a snapshot of corporate success. They provide insight into what consumers increasingly value, how preferences are evolving, and where demand is moving next. Yelp’s 2026 Fastest-Growing Brands report does exactly that. Based on growth in consumer engagement across the Yelp platform, the rankings highlight brands […]
Nielsen and Mediaocean Bring Advanced Audiences Into Linear TV’s Core Workflow
For years, advanced audience targeting has been one of the biggest promises in TV advertising. The challenge has never been defining sophisticated audience segments—it has been carrying those audiences consistently from planning and buying through measurement and reporting. That is the problem Nielsen and Mediaocean are now attempting to solve. The companies announced a new […]
Walmart and Magnite Signal Retail Media’s Next Phase
Walmart’s new partnership with Magnite may signal a broader shift in how retail media networks operate. Rather than requiring advertisers to work within retailer-controlled ecosystems, companies are increasingly looking to make their first-party data available across the platforms agencies already use. For multi-location brands and agencies, the move points toward a more interoperable future for […]
Scooter’s Coffee Growth and the Future of Franchise Marketing
As multi-location brands push deeper into expansion mode, one of the biggest operational challenges is no longer simply opening new locations. It is maintaining consistent customer engagement, local visibility, and brand standards across hundreds of markets simultaneously. Scooter’s Coffee is increasingly confronting that reality firsthand. The rapidly growing drive-thru coffee chain, Scooter’s Coffee, has expanded […]
Why Programmatic Audio Is Winning New Attention From Advertisers
As marketers search for incremental reach across an increasingly fragmented media landscape, audio advertising is emerging as a powerful complement to CTV, social, and digital video. A new partnership between Basis and DAX highlights how programmatic audio, audience targeting, and omnichannel campaign management are reshaping media planning. While connected TV, retail media, digital video, and […]
SOCi Hits 300,000 AI Agents as Automation Goes Mainstream
AI agents are quickly moving beyond experimentation and becoming part of the operating infrastructure behind enterprise marketing. That trend was on display this week as SOCi announced that it has surpassed 300,000 deployed Genius Agents™, a milestone the company says establishes the largest deployed agentic workforce in marketing. The announcement underscores how rapidly enterprise brands […]