News and Analysis
How Brands Can Effectively Reach Gamers
As everyone knows, video games are deeply immersive and interactive. The environments are also among the most intimate for fostering customer relationships. Any interruptions within the platform that are not relevant or don’t add value are likely to alienate a brand’s consumer target. A new survey from Disqo, a customer experience platform, bears that out.
Commentary
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.
Location Weekly: Realworld Launches Adfindr for Local Ads
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.
3 Reasons Why Marketers Should Care About False App Reviews
Most apps live on Apple’s App Store — home to nearly two million apps and access to 100 million iPhone users. Once a brand joins these ranks, there’s one goal: Drive positive ratings that entice more users to download and try the app. High ratings are critical for app visibility, as a higher rating has a strong correlation to trial, and Apple ranks those with more positive ratings and reviews higher than apps with negative ones.
But this ratings system can be manipulated to create false app ratings and skew scores, and that’s a bigger problem for marketers than they may realize.
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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.
As Privacy Regulations Shake Out, New Winners Emerge
Not even one month has passed since the implementation of California’s newest data privacy regulations, and some winners and losers are already beginning to emerge. As companies across the country work to comply with this new state law, fundamental shifts are happening and some brands are going back to an older style of data collection and usage.
How this retreat is viewed depends on who you’re talking to. Industry veterans like Dawn Colossi, chief marketing officer at FocusVision, see the return to more traditional forms of data collection as a good thing. Others in the industry have a different view on what returning to older forms of data collection will ultimately mean for technology and marketing firms.
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Beyond Likes: Win Hearts with Emotional Marketing