News and Analysis
‘Judge Beauty’ Wants this e.l.f. on Your Shelf
And the award for best non-sequitur in a Super Bowl ad this year goes to the TV personality known as Judge Judy: “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining,” Judge Beauty said when learning a “defendant” claimed she needed to spend $92 on makeup products. The 30-second spot, “Judge Beauty,” was from […]
Retail Bankruptcies: Life in the ‘Express’ Lane
Business and retail media are filled with stories of companies that are in the express lane towards restructuring and holding huge sales on their way toward bankruptcy. It has become such a popular topic of speculation that one online source even gives odds of bankruptcy filing. Over the past week, the media was placing odds […]
BOOM or BUST? Will the Mega MULO Crafts Store Survive?
As tech-centric as the world has become, handcrafts are still alive and well! Just look at Etsy, which has been steadily growing. Although the MULO (multi-location) crafts industry is not unraveling like an unfortunate knitting project, online competition has put a pin prick into big box store revenues. The pandemic also eliminated many in-store events. Just […]
Commentary
The Influence of Local Guides on Google Reviews: Part 2
Figuring out what type of Local Guides are leaving reviews, and what kind of reviews they are leaving, matters for a few reasons. First, Local Guides are responsible for writing more reviews of local businesses than any other group on the internet. Second, Local Guides write reviews under circumstances that make them different from ordinary consumers: They are self-selected volunteers who get rewarded, albeit in a non-monetary fashion, for their contributions. Fairly or not, they are often thought of as biased and their contributions as less valuable, merely “written for points.” Third, the true characteristics of Local Guides are not well known, because they have not yet been subject to this type of study.
What I Learned from 50 Examples of the New Local SERP
After conducting more than 50 “local intent” searches, I’ve found that not all of them return the new “mega map,” nor is the new layout as consistent as it at first appeared it would be. The range of searches I tried includes generic keyword searches for brick-and-mortar stores, such as the example above, as well as searches for local service providers, chain stores, products, and more. I tried covering a broad base of searches covering a range of categories. I made sure all of my searches would be interpreted as local by appending “san francisco” to each query.
Latest Posts
Street Fight’s April Theme: Mobile Madness
Privacy changes have been the big ad/martech and data industry story for the past year, and a major part of that story has been changes on mobile, especially those launched by Apple and to a lesser extent Google. We’ll be diving into those changes this month with a theme called Mobile Madness that centers on the latest approaches to mobile marketing as well as the challenges and opportunities currently facing mobile measurement.
4 Things Publishers Need to Do to Grow their Audience Data
Creating scalable audience solutions is proving to be difficult even for the largest publishers and very hard for anyone beyond that. Missed monetization opportunities could be a deathblow to publishers, and seeing that more than half are unable — or unprepared — to scale their audience solutions is cause for concern.
Location-Based Marketing Association: Mavi.io Launches OnMyWay App to Enable In-Car Ordering
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association talks about Snap teaming with SignAll to develop AR filters using ASL, Instacart partnering with Oriient for their IndoorGPS tech, Philadelphia’s transportation departments (OTIS) using location data for real-time bus arrival information, and Mavi.io launching OnMyWay app for ordering from your car.
The Growth of Visual Search
Claire Carlile, in a recent post on visual search that contains useful tips for local businesses, shows us that Google is now making it possible to conduct a search that starts and ends with images. Her example search is conducted using Google Lens, where an image of a Sony headphones package is the “query” that produces a local pack result replete with its own images. This may or may not be the future of search, but it’s highly representative of the visual-first orientation that Google is embracing to a growing degree.
Report: Online Shopping Experiences Disrupted by Last-Mile Delivery Delays
Online grocery sales reached nearly $98 billion in the U.S. last year. Restaurants and home essentials sellers also saw incredible growth. While demand for the local delivery of goods purchased online continues to skyrocket, a new report finds that persistent delivery disruptions in the last mile threaten to impact customer retention and blunt long-term industry growth.
Unstructured Data Becomes an Untapped Opportunity for Brands
Unstructured data now represents 80% to 90% of all new enterprise data, according to Gartner, but just 18% of organizations are taking advantage. Unstructured data, like product images, customer audio files, and comments from social media, represents an untapped opportunity for marketers.
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