News and Analysis

Generative AI

AI-Powered Digital Advertising is Exciting, But Is It New?

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While the integration of generative AI into virtually every modern marketing and advertising platform is exciting, it’s not exactly surprising. Despite the hype surrounding AI and its influence on the digital advertising industry at large, AI has been used in adtech for years. 

Primanti Bros

CEO Adam Golomb on How Restaurant Chain Primanti Bros Is Evolving

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Primanti Bros. has 41 locations across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Maryland, with three more to open by year’s end. CEO Adam Golomb and his team are deep in planning for summer events to commemorate the 90th anniversary of Primanti Bros. 

Reveal Mobile Launches Solution to Offer Authoritative In-Flight Campaign Insights

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Reveal Mobile is launching an OOH measurement solution for mid-market brands today, designed to let marketers know how their OOH campaigns are performing while their campaigns are still running — a major improvement with the potential to radically impact the performance of outdoor campaigns. 

Commentary

Ad Tech and Privacy

What First-Party Data Can and Can’t Do For Agencies

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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

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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.

Location Weekly: Realworld Launches Adfindr for Local Ads

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In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Merrell using voice and location to highlight nearby trails, Burger King’s Scary Places, Foursquare’s Marsbot for AirPods, Realworld launching Adfindr, and a new case study from Oriient on indoor positioning.

Latest Posts

Charting the Rise of Conversational AI

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Conversational AI is a broad term used to describe technologies that automate conversations and personalize customer experiences. With the right systems in place, brands are able to understand, process, and actually respond to voice inputs in a natural way. While voice assistants, chatbots, and messaging services like WhatsApp, Kik, and Facebook Messenger can all be harnessed in a conversational AI strategy, virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri are the most popular tools adopted by brand marketers today.

Heard on the Street, Episode 45: Building a Local Video Marketplace, with Stringr

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Video as a medium continues to gain prevalence given better bandwidth, mobile connectivity, and cultural factors. Creation and distribution tools also continue to democratize “pro-sumer” video like TikTok. But at the professional end of the scale, quality production is still expensive and hard to find.

This is the segment of the video market that Stringr addresses. The company has created a sort of networked marketplace to connect supply and demand for video creation. That includes everything from a library of locally relevant B-roll footage for news stories to specific on-demand assignments.

How the Rise of Unbranded Search Upends Restaurant, Retail, and Grocery Strategy

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Fueled by the growth of mobile and set to rocket even further north in coming years thanks to voice, unbranded searches like “burgers near me” or “Thai food” are growing as fast as 113% year over year, according to a fresh study by multi-location marketing firm MomentFeed. Unbranded search grew about 30% from 2016 to ’17 and 56% the following year before doubling pace in 2018-19, suggesting the slope of this trend’s adoption could get even steeper in coming years.

How to Stop Getting Bogus Leads from Facebook Ads

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Like a discordant refrain, these familiar phrases can feel like they’re playing on loop when following up with potential customers generated from Facebook Lead Ads. Bogus or misleading leads are a huge complaint among advertisers, but there are a few common and useful steps an advertiser can take when building Lead Generation Ad Campaigns to curb the occurrence of false leads. 

Certain aspects are out of our control from the advertisers’ end, such as trusting Facebook users to enter correct and non-misleading information, but armed with this handy checklist, you can audit your lead gen ads, making improvements to stem the tide of bogus leads.  

3 Tips for Attracting High-Quality Leads at Your Next Event

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First impressions are key, and it’s imperative that as soon as the lead is ready to buy, your brand is the first on their mind. 

Doing this requires you to understand your leads and deliver a message that appeals to their needs while portraying your brand in the best possible way. This is a big challenge because you want to promote your brand without going overkill and scaring leads away. 

Here are three steps for attracting higher-quality leads at your next event.

Three Methods to Deploy Foreground Data Effectively

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For those of us in the location data industry, we must adapt to the new world we live in and find solutions to solve the age-old problems our clients face. Foreground data (data that is captured only when a user has an app open) has the potential to be just as effective and insightful and can offer even greater insights into how people interact in the physical world.

Companies conducting location analysis can use three methods to help keep their solutions robust in this next era of location data; layer in foreground apps, reduce noise, and capitalize on inferences.  

Risks to Consider When Using Public Wi-Fi

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The next time you stop somewhere to grab a coffee, you should think twice before taking out your phone and looking for available networks. Public Wi-Fi may be a strong positive overall, but there are dangers inherent to using it, and you need to be aware of them. That’s why we’re going to cover them in this piece — so let’s run through them.

Location Weekly: Google Maps Update; NextNav’s $120M Round for Geolocation Services

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The Location-Based Marketing Association covers Home Depot piloting kiosks from Slyce to locate products in store, Google updating Maps with tips, transit, and AR, Air Canada enabling customers to use PayPal, NextNav raising $120M for 3D geolocation services in U.S., Korea’s Lotte going hi-tech to steal customers from e-commerce, and India’s NavIC possibly one day replacing GPS.

Valentine’s Day Boosts Entertainment, Food, and Social Apps

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The data shows that Valentine’s Day marks a major uptick in app usage across verticals. Compared to an average February day last year, on Valentine’s Day, entertainment app usage was up 24%, food and drink apps 20%, and social 16%. Consumers also spent an unusual amount of time on transport (7%) and gaming (6%) apps.

“Alexa, Order Pizza!” How Voice Ordering Will Impact Restaurants

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The numbers suggest consumers might be ready to start ordering food and beverages via voice, and voice shopping via at-home smart speakers is projected to reach $40 million in revenue by 2022. In 2020, we’ll see consumers leveraging this technology at a growing rate. In advance of this increase in adoption, restaurants will need to ensure they will be compatible with connected consumer devices.

In order to keep up with the likes of Dunkin’, Denny’s and Domino’s, restaurants of all sizes need to optimize their tech stacks and diversify their strategies.