News and Analysis
CPG Brands Rethink Advertising Strategy Amid Rising Food Costs, Inflation
While a decrease in food stamp benefits will clearly have the most profound impact on those families receiving benefits, it also marks a shift for supermarkets, retailers, and CPG brands, many of which are now looking to revamp their advertising strategies to account for a greater pool of shoppers searching for discounted items.
Commentary
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.
Managing a Remote Team: 3 Tips From a Cool Manager
Striving to be a cool manager in the workplace is one thing, but managing a remote team in a global pandemic presents a whole new set of challenges that none of us had ever experienced before. Your team may face distractions when working from home, technical difficulties with video calls, a poor internet connection, among other unusual challenges.
When confronted with these issues, it can be hard to hold your team accountable and maintain positive relationships in the same ways you did previously. But as a manager, it’s your time to step up to the challenge, reassess your leadership strategy, and keep your cool while navigating the new normal.
Latest Posts
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?
E-Commerce Trends to Watch This Year
The answer to solving the personalization dilemma lies in data. Retailers that are able to both harness and analyze data will be able to make the calculated decisions to improve their customer experience and give shoppers the personalized process they desire. However, only 27% of global retail and wholesale purchase influencers say that improving the use of data insights is currently a top priority. Artificial intelligence and machine learning tools can help dissect the data retailers receive, but it starts with the desire and capability of getting smarter about customer experience.
LBMA Presents Location Weekly: Placer.ai Raises $12M; X-Mode Acquires Assets of Location Sciences
On this edition of Location Weekly from the Location-Based Marketing Association: X-Mode acquiring the assets of Location Sciences, Placer.ai raising $12M, Stasher getting $2.5M to help travelers stow their luggage, MGI acquiring Verve, Kroger launching a new lab on digital grocery innovation, and H&M launching pay later with Klarna in the US.
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Why TV Remains the Heartbeat of Local Connection