News and Analysis
Geopath Data Shows Renewed Value of OOH
Geopath just released its 2023 Annual Forecast. For the first time, it includes transit stations, scheduled fleet media (i.e., sides of buses and other forms of transportation), and a new reach and frequency model derived from observed mobile location data. The return to normal makes OOH advertising as valuable as ever.
Why Social Media Giants Are Embracing Conversational AI
Generative and conversational AI seem to be taking over the world. The former entails generating images and text with keyword inputs… with results that are sometimes impressive, sometimes funny, and sometimes creepy. And the latter is all about AI-generated dialogues… with similar results.
5 Platforms Using Artificial Intelligence to Generate Ad Creative
Startups like Omneky, Creatopy, and Luna have been integrating AI technology into their ad creation platforms for years. With OpenAI’s ChatGPT hitting the mainstream, more brand advertisers are seeking out generative AI solutions to make their own campaigns more effective and scalable. Here are five companies to watch.
Commentary
Why Marketers Must Invest in Localized Media Strategies
We’re seeing uneven recoveries in both localized Covid-19 outbreaks and economies across the nation. This unpredictability, coupled with new essential needs, supply chain disruptions, and business realities (stores closing, competition rising), have rendered previously effective marketing tactics virtually irrelevant. A ground-up, local approach can help brands and marketers solve for all these new challenges by reducing waste and delivering on those essentials that consumers need during these atypical times.
The World Outside is Frightful—Drive Holiday Sales with Social Media Instead
The challenges of driving holiday sales in 2020 do not signify the end of retail, as many sensationalized headlines would have you believe. This e-commerce-focused season is, however, a siren call to local retailers who have yet to take social media marketing seriously.
In the absence of typical frantic holiday shopping foot traffic, social media is a necessary part of holiday marking to effectively reach consumers who opt to stay inside.
What First-Party Data Can and Can’t Do For Agencies
Make no mistake, first-party data will play a critical role in the future of marketing, as it always has. But agencies as trusted advisors, and the industry overall, need to be realistic about what first-party data can and can’t do for clients, especially in the face of a global pandemic that has upended everything we thought we knew about consumer behavior.
Latest Posts
10 Ways To Provide a Cutting-Edge Retail Customer Experience
Delighting customers isn’t about getting one thing right; it’s about firing on all cylinders, both online and in brick-and-mortar stores, to make an authentic connection with buyers to drive satisfaction and loyalty.
What does that look and feel like? Here are 10 examples of best practices that represent the state of the art in retail CX.
Location Weekly: Pinterest Experiments with AR; Zenreach Promotes Walk-Through Metric for O2O Marketing
In this 450th episode of Location Weekly, the cosmetics industry dominates the news. Pinterest is adding an AR make-up testing feature, and L’Oréal is getting personalized with the Perso app.
Atari is blending gaming and hotels, Zenreach is promoting a “walk-through” metric for online-to-offline marketing industry, Havas is partnering with Moving Walls for OOH measurement, and Google is partnering with Coconut Software for financial service reservations feature.
Email Monetization’s Place in the Changing Horizons of Digital Advertising
We all know that digital advertising isn’t going anywhere. When brands pull back on spending on social and display advertising, they’re putting more resources into other channels. Over the past year, email monetization has gotten the bulk of this attention.
Using AI to systematically select ads that appeal to a publisher’s recipients means brands aren’t wasting their budgets on readers who aren’t interested in their products, and publishers aren’t turning off their readers by running unappealing ads.
QR Code Generators for Cannabis Businesses
If the California Bureau of Cannabis Control’s proposed regulations are passed, state-licensed cannabis businesses will be required to display unique QR code certificates in their store windows. They would need to have their QR codes handy when transporting cannabis as well. In the long term, lawmakers are hoping the regulation will help consumers avoid purchasing cannabis from unlicensed vendors. In the short term, though, the proposed regulation is forcing dispensaries and other cannabis businesses to search for ways to create compliant QR codes for their stores.
How VPNs May Undermine, Rather Than Protect, Your Data Privacy
Now that ISPs can access everything you do through the IoT, the level of privacy invasion has reached a staggering new high. You don’t need to look any further than the recent Telnet leak of over 500,000 passwords of IoT devices, routers, and servers to understand this.
This invasion of privacy, alongside the growing angst towards data collection activities of tech giants, has led many to seek safety in the world of virtual private networks. But research indicates VPNs are often insecure.
Heard on the Street, Episode 44: Retargeting in a Multiscreen World, with Tremor Video
Two media consumption trends stick out from the last decade. The first is that video continues to gain prevalence given better bandwidth, mobile connectivity and cultural factors. The second is that our attention is increasingly fragmented between screens and delivery platforms, such as streaming apps.
Tremor Video has positioned itself at the center of that two-way intersection. The company provides a video creation and distribution engine to maximize impact for brand marketers, according to Devin Fallon, VP of Media Insights & Analytics, and the latest guest on our Heard on the Street podcast.
Protecting People, Not Just Data: What Consumers Trust by Industry Suggests About Privacy
Market research firms ranked second only to financial institutions on our trust index, with 52.7% confirming their trust in market research firms to protect their data, and 8.8% noting a strong trust in the same. Indeed, even though people arguably share similarly sensitive information on both social media sites and with researchers, they are 1.6 times more likely to trust researchers than social platforms.
Why is this? It’s because it is the duty and responsibility of market researchers to foster a relationship of trust by openly engaging people, diligently protecting their data and privacy, and fairly rewarding them for their participation — and it is because that mission is continuously reinforced and communicated.
Don’t Fix What’s Broken. Reinvent the Wheel with a Unified Measurement Framework
By facing the harsh truth that we need to lean into disruption – instead of patching up past approaches or creating inadequate work-arounds – our industry will build something better that helps us increase value in our marketing spend. Shifting to CMM would provide a framework to address the full business (not just marketing) needs, and help us all be ready to adapt through data-driven decision making. And when you can adapt, you can build competitive advantage, evolve, and thrive.
Retailers Succeed at Listings, Struggle on Rankings, Review Response
Retailers scored best on average on listings, suggesting that management is succeeding at getting multi-location stores to optimize the fundamentals of their online presence. The poorest average category score, rankings, indicates brands are failing to pop up when consumers search for unbranded items. At a time when consumers are increasingly searching for items “near me” instead of brand-name stores where they could find those items, businesses stand to gain if they invest in non-brand-specific keywords.
Street Fight’s February Theme: Beyond the Screen
Consumer touchpoints continue to fragment and atomize, disrupting conventional approaches to media and tech. Drivers of this trend include devices from smart speakers to cars. Accordingly, as we roll into February, the Street Fight editorial team is thinking outside the box — that is, beyond the rectangles that frame our typical screen interfaces.
We will provide deep coverage of emerging technologies including voice search, visual search, augmented reality, and 5G. How are tech providers innovating with these modalities? How are users adopting them? And how are local marketers tackling the opportunity?
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The Road Ahead: What Autonomous Cars Teach Us About Marketing Automation