News and Analysis

5 Franchise Tips to Ease Friction

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Franchise businesses account for a whopping 10.5% of all companies with paid employees. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, they account for $1.3 trillion in sales across various industries. Franchising enables brands to grow and quickly open multiple locations. People who buy into franchises have the ability to fulfill their entrepreneurial dreams without shouldering the […]

Acoustic Gets to the ‘Why’ of the Customer Journey

Acoustic Gets to the ‘Why’ of the Customer Journey

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Acoustic is a global SaaS subscription company that provides customer-engagement tools for B2C brands. It has worked with brands including Pura, PayPal, Scientific American, and Ticketmaster. In 2022, Acoustic helped clients manage over 120 billion personalized interactions by focusing on the customer journey. John Riewerts, SVP of Engineering at Acoustic, explains the company’s newest offering […]

Emodo COO: AI Is Where We’re Continuing to Focus

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As the mobile adtech division of the telecom giant Ericsson, Emodo is placing a major emphasis on AI-driven performance and personalization in programmatic advertising this year. The company is also doubling down on innovations around optimization, especially as it relates to targeting, innovative formats, and unique inventory. At the head of all these initiatives is […]

Commentary

Brand Marketing 2.0: Brand is Back, But Expectations Have Changed

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The allure of immediately seeing metrics like clicks, downloads, or form completions outweighed instincts to make investments that pay dividends over the longer term. No longer.

Sprint to Success with Agile Marketing

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Even though agile marketing has been around for a couple of decades, keep in mind that it’s a modern approach for today’s marketers — in keeping with the focus on data. With the right martech to support performance measurement needs (using metrics that are credible outside of marketing), you can sprint to success with agile marketing.

Retailing in the Post Covid-19 World

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Throughout the pandemic, lockdowns and safety restrictions have forced retailers to tweak their operations and strategies in accordance with changing circumstances around them. AI has played a key role in helping retailers adapt to the conditions of today and those on the horizon.

With that in mind, here are three key areas where AI is helping retailers cope with the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Latest Posts

Location Data Says Krispy Kreme’s Times Square Plan May Be Half-Baked

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As someone who studies human mobility in New York routinely, I am compelled to question the pandemic-era business logic behind this aggressive expansion. The world will go back to normal or something like it one day, but, by using our human mobility data sets and assuming a continuation of current trends, we can see there is little evidence that these new Krispy Kreme locations will draw enough foot traffic in the coming months and quarters to survive, let alone thrive. 

Heard on the Street, Episode 57: Streamlining the Digital Ad Stack

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What can one learn through a combination of the Peace Corps, CPA training, and the ad tech world? On Street Fight’s Heard on the Street Podcast, we often talk about the virtues of “cross-training” in a given career path. Perhaps no one embodies that principle more than VRTCAL founder Todd Wooten.

Covid-19 is Boosting Mobile Use, and These Apps Are Taking the Lion’s Share

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With many social options put on hold, people find solace in retail therapy. Between April 2019 to 2020, the cost to acquire a user who completes a first purchase in a shopping app has decreased by more than half (50.6%), compared to the same period in 2018. Similarly, the cost to acquire a registration ($8.76) has dropped nearly 40%.

Plus, with a 40% increase in purchase engagement year-on-year — and 110% increase over two years — it’s clear conditions are positive for marketers to reach and engage a highly motivated, high-value audience.

How Small Businesses Can Conquer E-Commerce for the Holidays

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As the pandemic continues, consumers are shifting their expectations of brands as well. They don’t just want coupons in their email anymore, they expect an intuitive browsing and checkout process, accurate inventory and out-of-stock notifications, curbside delivery, and fast shipping.

E-commerce is already a must-have, and small businesses who understand this and take steps to offer their customers a way to buy online will create a memorable experience, more long-term loyalty, and ultimately more sales this holiday season.

Mobile Ad Network Vungle Acquires Mobile Ad Platform AlgoLift

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Vungle helps mobile app developers monetize their apps through advertising and connects advertisers with mobile app media. The AlgoLift purchase will help Vungle’s advertisers better solve for attribution and optimize in-app ad spend.

Facebook, Holocaust Denial, and the Refusal of Politics

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Facebook’s long-term refusal to strike down Holocaust-denial content is not a problem specific to Facebook. It’s not a decision limited to Zuckerberg or a few feckless executives. The problem is not even limited to tech.

Facebook’s purported refusal of politics — its reluctance to accept that it has always been a political actor and that its content-moderation policies and algorithms have real-world effects on what people believe and what they do, up to and including acts of physical violence as in Myanmar — is a structural feature of shareholder capitalism. A content ecosystem whose leaders are so timid as to let Holocaust denial flourish is the logical result of an approach to management that views its only responsibility as minimizing costs and maximizing market capitalization.

How In-House Agencies Can Provide Value During and After Covid-19

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When asked what the most critical resources for producing ads post Covid-19 were, 55% of ANA members said in-house teams, as compared to 42% for other internal teams and 26% for external agencies.

In many respects, Covid just accelerated the already impressive growth of in-housing. Moving forward, these teams’ proximity to the business and growing strategic importance mean they are in a good position to deliver greater value to their organizations in three critical ways.

CCPA’s Impact: Businesses Prepare for Fall Surge in Data Subject Requests

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In a customer set with more than 16 million consumer records — with consumer records being defined as a single, individual record associated with a unique email address within a database — DataGrail found that people are largely taking action to control their privacy by exercising rights provided by the CCPA.

Consumers opt-out of their personal information being sold “most” of the time, and deletion requests make up 31% of all data subject requests. Twenty-one percent of consumers have accessed their data thanks to the new regulations.

Here’s Why October Is the Perfect Time to Pressure-Test Holiday Strategies

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With consumers still spending – and their evolving shopping preferences and behaviors becoming increasingly clear for Halloween and beyond – October presents a prime opportunity for retailers to pressure-test and refine their holiday 2020 strategies. 

Here are three considerations as we enter one of the most critical quarters in retail’s history.

Location Weekly: BMW Geo-Fencing, Gimbal Acquiring TrueX, Amazon One Payments

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In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers BMW geo-fencing E-Drive zones, IKEA’s “Buy With Time” campaign in Dubai, Gimbal acquiring TrueX from Disney, and Amazon One letting you pay with a wave of your hand.