News and Analysis

Why Are Multi-Location Brands Ghosting Their Customers?

Why Are Multi-Location Brands Ghosting Their Customers?

You may have heard of ghosting in the dating or job application world. It’s when someone communicates with you and then vanishes suddenly and without a trace. Your messages go unanswered. Here today…ghost tomorrow! Multi-location brands (MULO) are ghosting their customers and prospects. A recent study by SOCI, “The High Cost of Invisibility for Multi-Location […]

On GDPR’s 5th Anniversary, Fragmentation Remains Biggest Privacy Challenge

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Although the privacy landscape is quite different in 2023 than it was five years ago, when the European Union’s GDPR went into effect in May of 2018, the adtech industry in the U.S. remains in a state of flux, struggling to deal with fragmentation caused […]

5 Franchise Tips to Ease Friction

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 […]

Commentary

Post-Third-Party Cookie Advertising and Experiences

Companies will still need to provide an equivalent user experience to the unknown visitors or risk driving them away. They will need to find incentives to drive authentication and opt-ins; additionally, they will need to create a brand experience that is broadly accessible in lieu of today’s personalized approaches that rely on third-party data insights.

Ad Tech and Privacy

How Privacy Will Upend Advertising in 2021

Of course, if mobile numbers are adopted as a universal ID, Apple, Google, and Facebook won’t get their way. They will not go down quickly and will likely continue to bury email IDs as a viable solution. We’ll see the entire industry disrupted as each of the powerhouses marches forward with their plans to own the future of privacy, ensuring they monetize the very thing they are touting to protect.

3 Changes in CTV That Will Endure in 2021

While this year has seen so much change in TV, I expect even more next year, especially given that there is so much uncertainty related to Covid-19. With that in mind, here are three CTV predictions for 2021 and the ways they stand to impact the industry. 

Latest Posts

The Fight Against Facial Recognition Tech

Microsoft and Amazon suspended their sales of facial recognition technology to police departments in recent weeks amid nationwide protests against police brutality. IBM went even further, ceasing its research on the subject altogether.

It might be clever and intuitive, but facial recognition technology is highly invasive. Little wonder, then, that across the world, people are joining the fight against its implementation.

Data Enrichment, Your Business, and Your Career

Creating great customer experiences is ultimately what matters most, and this requires a single customer view and data enrichment techniques for a deep understanding of your customer. Organizations that rely on only first-party data are at a disadvantage. They risk missing out on valuable new information as time passes. For example, did your customer just move to a new state or buy a new home? 

How Connected TV Ads Help SMBs Recover from Crisis

One medium that will be especially helpful in the recovery is connected TV (CTV). About three-quarters of households own connected TVs, so SMBs can easily reach the public through this ad-supported medium as life returns to normal.

There are many opportunities to excel both in the current and post-pandemic marketing landscape, but businesses will only be able to take advantage of them if they intelligently create demand. Because of this, SMBs should use audience and measurement data to inform their CTV advertising strategies as markets reopen.

Location Weekly: Pinterest Dives into Visual Commerce

In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association hosts Senior IT Manager of Mall of America, Patrick Wand.

The team also covers Incognia launching in US with its location behavior biometrics platform, Liquid Core Gum Co. installing Space Station touch-free gum dispensers, and Pinterest letting its users shop with their cameras.

Why Consumers Want Coupons — And What Kind They Value Most

Amid ongoing reports of consumer fatigue with coupons and declining coupon redemption rates, there is a ray of hope for retailers—mobile coupons. While consumers have a wide range of preferences in terms of their mobile engagement, CodeBroker’s mobile consumer research, based on input from more than 1,500 consumers around the country, offers one takeaway that applies to the masses: Mobile couponing works. There are a variety of reasons that this is the case.

Heard on the Street, Episode 52: Localizing Print Advertising

Digital gets all the attention these days. And rightly so: it legitimately has more robust capability to do things like target audiences and measure results. But we often forget that print media still holds advantages like premium status and deeper engagement.

The ideal approach in advertising is to cherry-pick the best of both worlds. This is where MNI Targeted Media, with a specialty in premium print channels like magazines coupled with targeting expertise, stakes its claim to relevance. MNI director of planning and strategy, Tommy Shaw, joins us on the latest episode of Heard on the Street (listen above).

The Changes Mobile Publishers Must Make during the Economic Recovery

As we modify stay-at-home orders, the news is mixed for mobile publishers. Content consumption during quarantine rose as much as 80%. But advertising has suffered — 38% of advertisers halted all advertising, while 45% paused mid-campaign. It’s an ugly paradox — consumers value their mobile devices more than ever, but publishers are struggling to monetize that value.

Here’s how mobile publishers should prepare for the uncertain road ahead.

MarTech Firms Pivot to Meet Post-Pandemic Demands

The marketing automation company Act-On Software is relaunching today with an affordable solution for companies that are bogged down by budget cuts and lay-offs due to Covid-19 shutdowns, but they’re not the only company making big changes.

In fact, Act-On is just one of a number of martech firms gunning to help businesses as they emerge from Covid-19 shutdowns. Jungle Scout has released a solution for brands leveraging the power of Amazon, Agora.io is expanding its reseller partnerships, and BounceX is using SMS to help retailers recover revenue lost because of Covid-19. Act-On is refining its approach to marketing automation, with new product capabilities meant to drive personal product engagement and a tighter focus on helping marketers evolve their businesses.

Why IP Targeting Has Never Been More Relevant

A lot of money has been invested in slicing, dicing, and tying data to IP addresses to give rich profiles of online users at a very granular level, such as the sub-postal code, and in many cases ZIP-plus-4. IP targeting is certainly not down to a household level, as that defeats the privacy-sensitive nature of these solutions. Plus, IP addresses and internet infrastructure are not really made for that type of targeting. It’s not something that can be done.

But you can get much deeper profiles of behavior once you know that type of granularity around a user. If a business traveler is at a point of interest, for example at a hotel, he or she will have different interests than a residential online user. That involves building context around users―a very valuable evolution in IP targeting.

With Covid Insights Tracker, GroundTruth Looks to Democratize Location Data

GroundTruth’s new Covid-19 Insights tracker gives brands a way to track foot traffic down to the zip code level. The tracker is updated weekly, with the ability to search for daily foot traffic across a number of categories, like auto dealers, banks, restaurants, and retail.

Data comes from the 30 billion annual global visits GroundTruth observes on its platform. The company uses indexed foot traffic to demonstrate the relative increase or decrease in visits to different places of interest, with weekly and daily charts depicting foot traffic indexed against average weekly/daily visits starting from December 30, 2019.