News and Analysis
BUST: A Hard Landing as Soft Surroundings Files for Bankruptcy
Here we go again…another beloved retailer shutters its brick-and-mortar operations. Soft Surroundings filed for bankruptcy this week. This MULO (multi-location) women’s clothing brand once had 80 locations physical locations (reduced to 44) and is now shuttering all of them. The company, which released its first catalog in 1999, also sold home goods and accessories. However, […]
Captify, Adform Partnership Creates First End-to-End Contextual Activation
A new partnership between the search intelligence firm Captify and Adform, a programmatic platform, is creating an industry-first end-to-end contextual activation that bypasses the need for cookie identifiers. The collaboration between the Captify and Adform enables privacy-first, audience-based programmatic buying for marketers, opening the door to greater scale across inventory pathways, which are often deprioritized […]
Commentary
Google Local Search Trends I: Personalization
Though it’s not always easy to find the common threads in Google’s complex evolution of the local search consumer experience, some themes do stand out, such as the drive toward increasingly personalized search results, which I’ll be covering in this initial entry in the series. Fortunately for marketers, personalization, along with the other themes I’ll cover, offers numerous opportunities to outpace the competition and convert more searchers into buyers. A better understanding of these emerging trends will help marketers prioritize their efforts.
Latest Posts
The Undeniable Drive of Diana Lee and Constellation Agency
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.
SOCi Acquires Brandify, Melding Location Marketing Strengths
Brandify has been acquired by SOCi, a fast-growing market leader in location and social media management for enterprise brands. Brandify and SOCi will combine their technologies and expertise under the SOCi name to serve more than 700 major national and international brands, accounting for over 3 million total store and office locations worldwide. The acquisition includes Street Fight, which will continue to operate as an editorially independent media outlet.
LBMA: Sam’s Club Tests Scan and Ship Feature in Stores
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Brookfield Properties partnering with ARIA Network for AR air rights activations, Adtech Realworld lauching QDOOH to make buying billboards easy for local brands, Sams’s Club testing a “scan & ship” feature for in-store shopping, and Coty getting Covid-friendly with perfume sampling.
The Grand Reopening: DOOH Strategies to Capitalize on Lifted Restrictions
DOOH screens can be found in most of the locations that consumers were restricted from over the past year — such as bars, restaurants, malls and movie theaters — as well as essential places that consumers continued to visit, including convenience stores, gas stations, subways, grocery stores, and more. Now that people are returning in droves to these environments, marketers are using a variety of DOOH strategies to reach consumers. Let’s review those tactics.
Streets Ahead: Google Chat, and Instagram Reels