News and Analysis
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 […]
Opterus Puts the ‘Opps’ in Franchise Operations
If you are a pet owner who resides in California, your pet’s needs will differ to some degree compared to those of a pet owner in the Northeast. For example, the fundamental level of care can change based on local weather differences, explained Gary Stonell, SVP Sales & Operations at Opterus, a SaaS-based company that […]
Commentary
How Personalized Packaging Can Drive Loyalty and Conversions
The key word here is experience. Opening a box full of bubble wrap or (get the vacuum ready) packing peanuts does not lend itself to compelling video content. What cements a product in the viewer’s mind is the branded experience. This could be personalized tissue paper, a thematic wrap element, clever inlay design, or custom selected product samples, to name a few.
How Retailers Can Scale their Workforces for the Holidays and Beyond
How can operations and HR leaders in retail organizations overcome a significant worker shortage, both now and in the future?
Tips for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Discounting
To meet the moment, retailers should be paying attention to the macro-factors impacting the current retail environment, ever-changing customer preferences (even so much as the final days before BFCM), and the nuances of the company’s own assortment and capabilities.
Latest Posts
5 Tips for Maximizing Your Performance CTV Strategy
From an advertising standpoint, OTT has some inherent advantages, especially for performance marketers. In the linear world, advertisers have to find programs or channels that over-index against the desired audience. On OTT, this audience filtering is done pre-bid. That means if you want to reach audiences who are in-market for a product or service, you can use real data to reach that exact audience with very little waste because of the dynamic ad insertion.
Evocalize Banks $12 Million to Scale its Local Digital Marketing Platform
Seattle-based collaborative marketing startup Evocalize has grabbed $12 million in Series A funding for its data-driven digital marketing solution designed for local businesses and the real estate industry.
Valid Consent: Building Trust and Demonstrating Compliance
Let’s explore how marketers, privacy professionals, and data managers can work together to obtain valid proof of consent, and why it’s critical to activate consent, preferences, and first-party data in a way that honors consumer privacy.
Live Commerce Guides Retailers to Success in the Metaverse
Immerss Co-Founder Patrick Jacobs says his company is working with a number of retailers to leverage live commerce as a way to blend the physical and digital worlds. Jacobs says sales rates with live commerce are on par with or better than in-store conversion rates, and that merchants jumping into live commerce now will be better prepared for the metaverse boom in the future.
What’s Next for Personalization and Digitization in E-Commerce
We’ll see the evolution of two major e-commerce trends in 2022. First, e-commerce retailers will work to make their digital homes less of a copy of every other e-commerce site and more of a destination that users want to spend time at. Second, the line between brick-and-mortar and digital is going to become fuzzier and less defined.
How Do the “Other” Search Engines Handle Local Search?
I wanted to look in particular at search engines other than Google and their treatment of local search. I was intrigued by the recent announcements that Bing was making forays into product inventory as a component of local search as well as the launch of Bing Travel, a Google Travel competitor but with a very different approach to destination-based search and discovery. Similarly, recent news about the exponential growth of Brave and DuckDuckGo in our era of privacy impelled me to find out more about their handling of local results.
Location-Based Marketing Association: Indoor Maps as a Service
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association discusses Catalina partnering with Place IQ, Japanese dating agency Matching Advisor Press using vending machines to find matches, Seattle launching an NFT Museum, and Here Technologies launching Indoor Map as a service.
TV Advertising Versus Social and Search
TV ads are delivered to consumers in a clutter-free environment, where the consumer is usually in a “leaned back,” focused state of being. TV ads are often delivered via 60″+ TV screens with full surround-sound audio, creating an immersive “sight, sound, motion” impact like no other medium. Of course TV drives better recall! And if TV ads drive better recall, basic logic would conclude that TV ads also drive better consumer response.
6 Contactless Shopping Solutions for In-Store Retail
The retail industry took notice when Merkle debuted its newest contactless shopping solution at CES 2022 this month, but the company’s Scan & Know product isn’t the only touchless retail solution on the market. Thanks to the continued adoption of augmented reality and virtual reality among consumers, more technology providers are developing in-store retail experiences that keep physical contact to a minimum.
Catalina Partners with PlaceIQ to Connect Omnichannel with OOH
A new partnership between the shopper intelligence provider Catalina and the data provider PlaceIQ could have a major impact on the way multi-location brands run optimized OOH campaigns in the coming years.
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Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem