News and Analysis
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 […]
Big Happy Brings Real-Time Context to 3D DOOH Campaigns
Imagine a billboard that changes based on the weather, local events, or what’s happening in the neighborhood around it. Big Happy says the next generation of 3D DOOH advertising is designed to do exactly that. Which will it be, contextual relevance and visual impact? Brands that want both in the DOOH channel no longer have […]
Broadsign and Partners Execute Fully Agentic OOH Campaign
Broadsign, Global Netherlands, and Draft Digital have demonstrated what may be the first fully agentic OOH (out-of-home) campaign, with autonomous AI agents handling everything from media planning to campaign execution. The project offers an early glimpse into how AI could reshape media buying, hyperlocal targeting, and the future role of marketers. Broadsign and Global Netherlands […]
Commentary
Why AI Is Forcing Marketing to Move From Channels to Intent
For decades, marketing teams organized their strategies around channels—search, social, email, and paid—each measured and optimized separately. But as AI increasingly mediates how buyers discover, compare, and choose products, that channel-based model is breaking down, forcing marketers to rethink their infrastructure around something far more important: customer intent. That channel-based structure shaped everything from budgets […]
The Missing Piece in Multi-Location Marketing: Location-Level Attribution
Multi-location marketing has become dramatically more sophisticated over the past decade. Brands now operate across dozens or hundreds of markets, running paid search, local SEO, social campaigns, listings management, and reputation programs simultaneously. But while marketing execution has scaled, measurement often hasn’t kept up. Multi-location brands often rely on dashboards that show total leads, conversions, […]
How Community-Focused Messaging Drives Loyalty for Multi-Location Brands
There’s a reason the phrase “shop local” continues to resonate. For multi-location brands and the agencies that support them, it’s not just about geographic proximity — it’s about relevance, trust, and shared identity. Consumers don’t build loyalty because a brand is loud. They build loyalty because it feels connected to their community and reflective of […]
Latest Posts
AI Is Rebuilding the Local Marketing Stack — From TikTok to Mail
The AI marketing stack for local businesses is rapidly taking shape — and it’s transforming how consumers discover and choose brands. Platforms like TikTok are emerging as powerful discovery engines, AI assistants such as ChatGPT are influencing how consumers evaluate service providers, and even traditional channels like direct mail are being rebuilt with predictive targeting […]
How Digital PR Shapes AI Visibility for MULO Brands
AI platforms aren’t just a gateway to websites. They are narrators, deciding which brands are mentioned, how those brands are described, and which attributes are emphasized when recommendations are generated. For multi-location organizations (MULOs), this is important because search performance at the local level is no longer limited to whether a specific location ranks in […]
Kevel Integrates With Adobe to Enable Real-Time Retail Media Activation
Kevel has launched a native Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) Destination that enables retailers, marketplaces, and commerce media platforms to activate first-party audience data in real time for retail media campaigns. The new integration creates a direct streaming connection between Adobe Experience Platform and Kevel’s ad server infrastructure, allowing customer segments to update instantly at the […]
How Community-Focused Messaging Drives Loyalty for Multi-Location Brands
There’s a reason the phrase “shop local” continues to resonate. For multi-location brands and the agencies that support them, it’s not just about geographic proximity — it’s about relevance, trust, and shared identity. Consumers don’t build loyalty because a brand is loud. They build loyalty because it feels connected to their community and reflective of […]
AI Is Reshaping Even Direct Mail — And Home Services Brands Are Taking Notice
As AI continues to transform digital marketing, it is now reaching one of advertising’s oldest channels: direct mail. Imaginuity has launched AI Mail, a managed direct mail system designed specifically for home services brands. Powered by AdScience®, the company’s proprietary Customer Data & Activation Platform, the offering applies machine learning to identify high-probability households and […]
New Report Signals Growing Performance Gap in the Home Services Economy
A new national study from Scorpion suggests that local home services businesses are entering 2026 facing a widening performance gap — one shaped by rising homeowner expectations, AI-driven discovery behavior, and fragmented marketing infrastructure. Scorpion’s 2026 State of Home Services Marketing Report, based on responses from 2,000 homeowners and nearly 1,000 home services business leaders, […]
Enterprise Local SEO Has a Visibility Problem — And AI Search Is Making It Worse
Enterprise brands and multi-location businesses are investing more than ever in local SEO. Bigger budgets. Advanced tools. Experienced in-house teams and agency partners. Yet many multi-location brands are still missing a critical piece of the puzzle: true visibility at the location level. The culprit isn’t execution. It’s measurement — or more precisely, the lack of […]
Seedtag and IRIS.TV Bring Program-Level AI Targeting to Connected TV
Seedtag and IRIS.TV have formed a partnership to expand privacy-first neuro-contextual targeting in connected TV (CTV). The integration brings IRIS.TV’s program-level content signals into Seedtag’s AI engine, Liz, to improve contextual precision, scale, and transparency for advertisers. The collaboration focuses on strengthening program- and scene-level targeting in CTV without relying on identity-based signals. By combining […]
Guideline Bets on an “AI Factory” to Reinvent Media Planning
Guideline has unveiled a major expansion of its artificial intelligence strategy with the launch of the Guideline AI Factory, an internal innovation engine designed to accelerate how AI powers its ad intelligence data products and media plan management (MPM) technologies. The initiative marks a shift from standalone analytics capabilities toward embedded intelligence that directly supports […]
TikTok Is Becoming a Core Marketing Channel — Not Just a Social App
TikTok, once known purely for bite-sized content and entertainment, has evolved into a place people go to discover brands, learn what’s trending, and make decisions. With over 1 billion monthly active users globally and 200 million in the U.S.1, it’s become where someone might first hear about a product, look up a service, or decide […]
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