Back to School 2021: Supply Chain Shortages and High Demand

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Preparing for back-to-school shopping this year, retailers faced a tremendous challenge: anticipating consumer needs at a time when Covid case numbers are shifting month to month and the conditions of in-person learning remain unclear. Add supply chain squeezes and rising consumer expectations, and BTS, which is supposed to be among many retailers’ best seasonal events, risks proving disastrous.

Apple’s Long View of Data Privacy: Revisiting Jobs in 2010

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But what is the source of Apple’s self-interest, which drives its approach to privacy? I want to suggest that it’s not just a short-sighted opportunity to one-up Facebook and rival smartphone maker Google. Unlike the vast majority of tech companies recently touting new approaches to privacy, Apple isn’t new to this party.

The Undeniable Drive of Diana Lee and Constellation Agency

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Constellation Agency CEO and co-founder Diana Lee immigrated to the US at five and endured a rough-and-tumble childhood, watching her parents get robbed repeatedly. But to the extent that anyone can, Lee has beaten insecurity, economic and affective. She is at the helm of an advertising technology company that, while remaining self-funded, has outgrown its offices numerous times, catapulted to more than 100 employees, and is on track to report $45 million in revenue this year.

Field Day Leverages an Uber-Style, Human-to-Human Marketplace for Local Marketing

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An Uber for local marketing, Field Day connects brands, including current clients Panera Bread, Blaze Pizza, Equinox, and about 50 others, with “brand ambassadors”: locals who speak to the brands’ targets in their home neighborhoods in order to increase awareness and drive adoption.

Verizon Media Offers Opt-Out of Targeted Ads Across Its Network

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Verizon Media is partnering with the nonprofit Network Advertising Initiative, integrating its advertising ID with the NAI’s “Audience Matched Advertising Opt-Out” platform to allow users across the Verizon Media ecosystem to opt out of targeted ads.

Household Targeting Emerges as Alternative to Individualized Behavioral Ads

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Jon Schulz, Chief Marketing Officer at Viant Technology, checked in with Street Fight to lay out the benefits and drawbacks of targeting methods offering advertisers alternatives to one-to-one behavioral ads.

Fisherman Pioneers the No-Effort Web for Small Businesses

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Fisherman is pioneering what CEO and co-founder Ameet Kallarackal calls the “no-effort Web.” Beginning with a focus on restaurants, which still make up about 90% of its customer base, Fisherman is aiming to be the simplest, most automatic option available for small business owners and operators to create websites. The company claims to get the job done in just two minutes and typically has a website ready for a potential customer, often based purely on the business’ name and address, before approaching them.

With Fresh Funding, dataPlor Expands to Map the World

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dataPlor was founded in 2016 with a mission to map the businesses of the developing world. But before it could extend its reach across oceans, the company focused for years on just one country, Mexico. Now, with the help of expanded seed funding it announced just this morning, the startup is taking a technology-first approach to enrich its database, map vast territories, and accelerate growth.

Anti-Surveillance Group Claims Privacy and Antitrust Are Intertwined Issues

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Two of the major policy complaints to arise about the technology sector over the past few years have been that advertising platforms, most notably Google, Facebook, and Amazon, compromise user privacy and that a select few companies — the aforementioned names plus Microsoft and Apple — are so powerful that they prevent new innovators from competing. An open letter by privacy-oriented enterprises alleges that the two issues are intertwined.

Headless Checkout Tackles Cart Abandonment

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Fast is challenging the received wisdom about the e-commerce funnel with an innovation called headless checkout. The term refers to a technology that allows consumers to convert with one click wherever they encounter a product — think social commerce but for any venue on the web.

Contextual Ads Power Sophisticated Content Strategies in Privacy Era

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As the advertising industry turns back toward contextual, marketers will find a much more advanced technology than the one they may equate with the term. The privacy-safe ad method isn’t just serving up sneaker ads anymore; it’s powering sophisticated, content-based brand campaigns across multiple channels and target audiences.

Where Location Intelligence Stands as Foursquare Founder Steps Back

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The story of Foursquare reflects what the evolution of smartphones and location technology allowed marketers to achieve — unprecedented awareness of where consumers are and how to cater to them on that basis. But data privacy concerns are pushing the narrative into new territory.

Google Postpones Cookie Day of Reckoning

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Google announced it will not phase out cookies, which allow advertisers to track users across the Web, until mid- to late 2023. It had previously said it would do so by 2022.

food

Swiftly Closes the Online-to-Offline Loop for Grocers and CPGs

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Swiftly co-founder and CTO Sean Turner told me his company wants to be the “Google analytics for brick-and-mortar,” helping retailers, especially grocers, and consumer-packed goods brands not only sell and market their products online but also measure how both online and physical channels are performing.

What is Omnichannel Video? And Why Is Now the Time to Tackle It?

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Marketers have become familiar with omnichannel commerce, which brings mobile, desktop, and physical commerce experiences together so that the consumer can hop from one to the other without logistical setbacks. Omnichannel video means aligning an advertiser’s video strategy so that messages take advantage of the device they’re on and complement each other across channels.

Invoca Acquires DialogTech as Companies Chase New Data Sources

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With Google phasing out cookies and Apple limiting access to the identifier for advertisers, among other data privacy reforms, companies need more information about what their customers need. Conversation intelligence solution Invoca thinks it is taking a step toward providing that access with its $100 million acquisition of rival DialogTech.

Importance of “Performance Content” Grows alongside E-Commerce

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When digital marketers think of content, they may think of Google Posts, basic SEO material, or thought leadership posts. But as e-commerce thrives, the most fundamental content to upgrade may be what digital marketing firm Jellyfish is calling “performance content.”

What Is Person-Based Advertising?

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Account-based marketing promised to take marketing to a new level of granularity. Instead of targeting entire companies, marketers would be able to connect with the specific accounts within enterprises that could lead to conversions.

But Influ2 reckons that ABM doesn’t offer B2B marketers enough granularity. As a result, it is pioneering person-based advertising in the B2B space, bringing the personalization of consumer marketing to the B2B setting.

2021: All Upside for Digital

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As retailers try to determine how to welcome customers back in person while expanding digital efforts that accelerated last year, NetElixir CEO and founder Udayan Bose weighed in on what to expect from commerce and why retailers should invest aggressively in online channels.

Digital Advertising’s 2-Sided Transparency Problem

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There’s another side to digital advertising’s transparency problem: Companies don’t even know what they know about consumers. Just as consumers use dozens of apps, businesses use hundreds of applications. Most, if not all, of them collect data on employees and customers. But sifting through that data, figuring out what is necessary, and determining whether it is privacy-compliant is a Sisyphean task.