News and Analysis
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 […]
Acoustic Gets to the ‘Why’ of the Customer Journey
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
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
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.
Contactless Pay Is the Next Big Pivot in Retail CX
Remember when Amazon launched Prime? The entire retail customer experience (CX) changed overnight — for everyone. The bookseller-turned-everything-seller suddenly offered low prices and fast and free delivery, leading traditional retailers to pivot drastically to keep up with their mega-competitor.
But sometimes, unexpected CX overhauls are a good thing — especially when competitors have to pivot, too.
Latest Posts
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.
The Future Isn’t First-Party or Third-Party Data. It’s Earned Data.
Google’s recent announcement of its intention to phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome browser over the next two years, in addition to sparking plenty of speculation and doomsday prophecies, has led to much discourse over what a future driven by first-party data, as opposed to third-party data, might look like for marketers.
But there’s a lesser-known type of data that’s being left out of these conversations—one that sits in between first- and third-party data and delivers both accuracy and scale. It’s called earned data, and it warrants the attention of every marketer who’s planning their transition to a cookieless world right now.
Location Weekly: PayPal Facilitates Contactless Payments
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association hosts Vanjo Wandscher, Group CEO, ROQQIO Commerce Solutions.
The team also covers Westfield’s Mall of the Netherlands using LEDs and AR to drive social distancing, MapinHood ensuring social distancing on sidewalks, and PayPal facilitating QR code contactless payment.
The Impact of Covid-19 on Local Search for Healthcare
On March 20, the Google My Business team announced they would disable reviews and Q&A (since restored) in order to conserve human and machine bandwidth for critical updates. New listing creation and verification was also temporarily disabled. Google made these moves, in large part, in order to ensure that listings in critical categories, especially healthcare, would remain up to date.
The Google My Business product team also rushed to create new features in response to the crisis, such as a “temporarily closed” flag in the GMB dashboard and prominent attributes showcasing the availability of services like pickup and delivery. Healthcare was a primary focus in this phase of new feature development, which is still ongoing.
As Retail Reopens, Voice Tech Takes Center Stage
Voice technology has been on the verge of going mainstream for nearly a decade. Despite big players like Amazon and Google launching their own smart speakers, and millions of consumers using the devices in their homes, investors in the voice technology space have been patiently waiting for the spark that would set off a new touchless world.
That spark is Covid-19.
Rakuten Ready Gives Merchants Access to Advanced Pickup Technology
Industry-wide curbside pickup has surged 208%, but statistics alone do not tell the complete story. Although large retailers were quick to pivot to a pickup-only strategy, small and mid-size retailers were largely boxed out. That’s because the ordering technology used by many large retailers comes with a price tag that small retailers cannot afford, and implementing the most sophisticated programs requires a level of technological sophistication that SMBs don’t usually have.
Rakuten Ready believes it has the answer to this problem.
Social Conversion Rates Climb During Covid-19
Covid-19 has changed the social media playbook, but brands who’ve been quick to adjust are seeing social conversion rates continuing to climb.
In an analysis of data pulled from more than 120 retail websites, the digital experience solutions company Episerver found that social conversion rates have increased steadily during Covid-19 shutdowns, from 1% in April 2019 to 1.2% in April 2020.
The Importance Of Marketing Localization During Times Of Disruption
In 2020, organization and transparency will be key for retail marketers. In the short term, retailers must identify and optimize existing technologies to stay afloat. In the longer term, the focus should be on evolving shopping behavior and enabling transformation through technology. Knowing that Q3 will be a critical quarter for retailers as Covid-19 lockdown policies begin to lift, retailers must plan their comebacks now, and that begins with a strong digital approach.
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem