News and Analysis

The 3 Technologies MULO Restaurant Businesses Need Today: A Chat with Eric Seymour

Eric Seymour is the VP of Channel Programs at me&u. The company provides tech-powered ordering to restaurants.  He believes strongly that the right technologies, combined with the best possible human-customer interaction, can help solve many of the problems multi-location (MULO) restaurants face today in terms of service and satisfaction today. What are the top three […]

Applying the Golden Rule to Omnichannel Retail Marketing

Tim Mason is not only CEO of Eagle Eye, a SaaS company that provides global personalized retail marketing via its loyalty and promotions platform, AIR, he is also a 30-year retail industry veteran, author, and keynote speaker. Before becoming head of Eagle Eye in 2016, Mason held senior executive positions at Tesco, the largest multinational […]

Santa Needs Fewer Elves This Year: Trends in Retail Employment

A recent retail employment study by Indeed indicates that although people are still hunting for seasonal jobs this holiday season, the number of job postings has dropped to pre-pandemic levels. Postings are down 3 percent from 2019 and 6 percent year-over-year. About 39 percent of Americans have side hustles, and many consumers depend on holiday […]

Commentary

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.

online privacy

Media Measurement in the Data Privacy Era

Marketers need to understand how to gather and leverage consumer data on the fly and according to protocol. Gartner forecasts increasing regulations will lead to more than one million organizations appointing a privacy officer by the end of 2022, a signal that now is the time to get serious about media measurement in the privacy era. Let’s explore some strategies that will define the next generation of media measurement.

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.

Latest Posts

Mapping Innovations Accelerate for the Post-Covid Era

The latest mapping innovations can be summed up in the announcements coming out of the last three major developer conferences. As we’re in the midst of developer conference season, this includes Google I/O, Snap’s Partner Summit, and Apple’s flagship WWDC. Let’s tackle those one at a time.

Brands Turn to Zero-Party Data Amid Privacy Restrictions

Tighter privacy restrictions are leading brand marketers to consider data collection opportunities they may have overlooked in the past, including some zero-party data collection methods that involve partnerships with subscription box companies and legacy media publishers. Unlike first-party data, which involves a company collecting insights about a customer or user, zero-party data is information that the customer or user proactively hands over to the brand.

SMBs Scramble to Capitalize on an Early Amazon Prime Day

Small and mid-size businesses saw record-breaking sales during Amazon’s Prime Day in 2020, with an increase of nearly 60% year-over-year. But with so much of the retail space currently in transition and an early Prime Day on the horizon, SMBs are scrambling to ensure they can take advantage of the corporate holiday this year.

Retailers, It’s Closing Time for Open Web Advertising

The digital ad industry is now living in the future we’ve been warned about for years — or one facet of that future, at least. We’re effectively living in a post-third-party-cookie world. But it’s not the end for retail marketing.

What Brands Can Do When the Cookie Crumbles

As third-party cookies are phased out, brands will have to stay nimble to weather the transition successfully. It’s a good idea to shift focus to contextual marketing and build up first-party data now. Keep an eye on better alternatives like Unified ID 2.0, and watch how agencies are adapting. That way, you’ll be ready when the cookie crumbles.

Retail Heavyweights Add Visual Search Experiences for Shoppers

When you haven’t stepped foot inside a store for months, navigating crowded aisles can be disconcerting. With products moving to new locations, and sales associates in scarce supply, major retailers are doubling down on visual search experiences to keep customers in the loop.

Ad Tech and Privacy

Anonymized, Localized Shopper Data Offers a New Beginning for Brand Marketers

Rather than fear upcoming changes, marketers should welcome the steps being taken to safeguard consumer data privacy and recognize the opportunity to leverage the massively rich, privacy-compliant consumer data sets that are still available to them.

food

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

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?

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.

Innovation Brief: Instacart and Instagram

M7 Innovations’ Matt Maher discusses Instacart’s new 30-minute-or-less delivery promise and Instagram tweaking its algorithm to avoid blocking pertinent content.