News and Analysis
Social Media May Be Winning the Search Engine Wars
As the search engine wars heat up and Microsoft prepares to unveil a new Bing powered by ChatGPT technology, a substantive competitor has entered the arena — social media. According to a new report, 82% of consumers prefer to search on social media over traditional search engines, and two in five would rather use TikTok than Google or Bing.
Digital Ad Regulation Doesn’t Necessarily Spell Disaster
There is disagreement over just how severely regulations will affect publishers, advertisers, and adtech companies. Scott McDonald, President and CEO at the Advertising Research Foundation, checked in with Street Fight to provide his take on what regulations are likely to pass and how they’ll affect digital advertising.
Brands Learn to Scale Campaign Execution with Ad Automation
Jay Kulkarni, CEO and founder of Theorem, is one of a growing number of thought leaders encouraging the use of advertising optimization and automation as a way to modernize the traditional ad revenue model. Rather than relying on highly-manual processes and workflows, he believes brands should look at automation as a way to speed up order cycles and decrease errors.
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Plan for Black Friday with this E-Commerce Holiday Checklist
Deloitte’s annual holiday retail forecast projects that e-commerce holiday sales will grow by 25% to 35% year over year, compared to a sales increase of 14.7% last year. Here’s a five-point holiday prep list to help ensure your digital commerce experiences stack up and are ready to engage the influx of shoppers this holiday season.
What’s Snapchat’s Local Play?
Snap continues to make moves in local commerce. Historic steps include geo-filters, while more recent activity includes Local Lenses and business listings in Snap Map. These features are notable on their own, but they get more interesting when you view them together and extrapolate to Snap’s local road map.
For example, Snap has more 13-34-year-olds active than any other channel, including Facebook and Instagram. This essentially means Snap can offer SMBs incremental and non-duplicated reach to an attractive audience.
Social Media is Not Enough: 3 Reasons Why Websites are a Must for Businesses
During the Covid era, the value of a website has increased exponentially. According to a recent survey, 82% of US small business owners find their website to be an essential part of their businesses’ success, and 54% reported a boost in website traffic since the beginning of quarantines.
Whether you’re a small business owner or someone with an idea, developing a website as your home base is beneficial to growing your customer base and online brand. Here’s why.
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Dispatch from CES: Giant TVs, Obsequious Gadgets, and Artificial People
I’m fresh from a couple of days wandering the halls of the Consumer Electronics Show, affectionately known as CES — the annual conference that descends upon Las Vegas in January and proffers the latest in technological solutions to improve every aspect of our daily lives. This is my first time attending the world’s biggest technology conference, where 4,500 companies this year are vying for the attention of 180,000 attendees, according to my Uber driver.
As I made my way through the crowds at the massive Las Vegas Convention Center and other conference venues, I tried to get a sense of the common themes defining consumer innovation as we begin a new decade.
Gimbal App Gives Consumers More Choice, Privacy Controls
While the digital marketing industry waits for full enforcement of California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to go into effect later this year, the mobile advertising, location solutions, and data company Gimbal is actively working to position itself as a leader in the consumer privacy space. The company recently launched a mobile app called LocationChoices, which gives consumers more control over how their data is used. Gimbal is also building a coalition with other industry players that would give participating vendors a way to systematically honor the requests of individual consumer opt-outs.
Local Search Association Rebrands as Localogy
In 2019, updates to Google’s local search algorithms and changes in the way consumers use mobile devices caused a shift in the way local businesses marketed themselves online. Digital marketing firms have been quick to pivot to meet market demand. As of today, one of the industry’s most influential not-for-profit associations is making a change as well.
Local Search Association (LSA), a not-for-profit association of companies focused on local and location-based marketing, will now be known as Localogy. The name change is part of a larger rebranding effort as the group looks for ways to better showcase its mission to re-invest in the changing nature of local business.
Leveraging Consumer Data in the Privacy Era
Industry executives are working overtime to help their clients maintain their current marketing practices without running afoul of the latest privacy regulations. Over at Tealium, a firm that specializes in customer data management and protection, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Mike Anderson is encouraging clients to focus on the customer experience of consent while clearly articulating why they need consumers’ data.
“You can’t build customer profiles if the data isn’t there,” Anderson says. “There’s a level of education needed at the point of consent to show the consumer what value they will get in return when they opt-in.”
Making Human Connections in the Age of Automation
The end of the decade marks a challenging time for marketers as they attempt to envision the next 10 years. At the turn of the 2010s, no one could have envisioned the advanced AI-powered marketing and campaign automation tools that are available today.
Despite access to smart technology, modern marketers still must balance multiple factors to create business value for all stakeholders, including eliminating boring, ineffective ads, grappling with the automation myth, embracing the data privacy age, and maintaining ethical AI practices.
Brave CEO Brendan Eich on a Privacy-by-Default Future for Digital Advertising
In light of last week’s enactment of the California Consumer Privacy Act and our monthly theme, Pursuing Privacy, Street Fight posed questions on surveillance capitalism, privacy, Big Tech, and the future of digital advertising to Brendan Eich, CEO of Brave, one of the leading companies championing privacy-first solutions in the tech industry.
“The entire industry is in need of a fundamental shift from tracking to privacy by default and by design,” Eich said. “To truly preserve consumer privacy, Big Tech needs to switch to a privacy-by-default approach. Nothing will change otherwise. Until then, consumers will remain confused about where their data is being used, and tracking and data monetization will remain pervasive on the web.”
Heard on the Street, Episode 42: Building an ‘Appnostic’ World, with Mobile Posse
As much as we love computing, the best technology is that which disappears. Most components of computing are an abstraction layer that stands between you and a given task or experience. That’s the case with layers of the typical consumer tech stack including operating systems, inputs, and apps.
App fatigue is the problem that Mobile Posse, the latest guest on Street Fight’s Heard on the Street podcast, is endeavoring to reform. The company’s Firstly Mobile platform replaces the app-heavy paradigm with a more curated, personal, and ‘appnostic’ front end to reduce the distance between users and quality content.
How Much Consumers Value Transparent Privacy Practices
Potential legal troubles and CCPA’s enforceability weaknesses aside, the Tealium study suggests a strong record on privacy will be a boon to brands as privacy increasingly takes center stage in the public consciousness. Ninety-seven percent of consumers said they are at least somewhat concerned about data privacy, and 85% said they won’t forgive a company’s misuse of their data.
In 2020, Independent Publishers Must Invest in the Quality of their Brands
The door is far from closed to success in publishing, and there are clear paths to prosperity for newer and leaner independent and local outfits. Even as more and more ad dollars go to a handful of giants, publishers have a chance to turn the tide, provided they invest in talent, maintain the integrity of their brands, and build an audience advertisers find worth pursuing.
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