News and Analysis
Regulators Crack Down on Cookie Consent Designs That Manipulate Consumers
After winning their battle against Meta for forcing users to accept personalized ads, E.U. regulators are taking on a new challenge — cookie consent banners. Specifically, lawmakers are beginning to look at how cookie consent banners are designed and whether deliberate design tricks are being used to manipulate web users.
BrightLocal Survey Finds Businesses Still Offering Incentives for Reviews
Nearly half of consumers have been offered incentives in exchange for leaving a business review, despite widespread efforts throughout the online review industry to cut down on the practice. According to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey, the practice of offering discounts or cash in exchange for reviews is on the rise.
Commentary
Foursquare’s New Audio Assistant is a Peek into the Future of Local Tech
Dubbed Marsbot for Airpods, Foursquare’s virtual assistant will whisper insights to users about their surroundings, unprompted, as they move throughout the world. This may be a recommendation for a local coffee shop or a fun fact about a landmark.
For brick-and-mortar businesses and the technology providers that help them connect with customers, the marketing possibilities are tantalizing.
Connecting the Dots on Google’s Visual Road Map
Google continues to double down on visual search and navigation. Its latest move came last week with updates to its Live View visual navigation to help users identify and qualify local businesses. This follows soon after its Earth Cloud Anchors that will let users create digital content on physical places.
Both developments tell us something about what may well be the future of local search: augmented reality-enhanced visuals.
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LBMA Presents Location Weekly: One Nation, Tracked; Uber Works; Smart Home Synergy
Location Weekly Episode #445 is ready to help you keep yourselves up to date over the holidays. Starting with a discussion on the New York Times article “One Nation, Tracked,” we also discuss Uber Works launching in Miami, the team-up of Amazon, Apple, and Google to make smart homes interoperable, and Goodwill reaching 1.4M mobile devices with location data via Teemo.
Blending Online and In-Store: The Boom of BOPIS
BOPIS — buy online, pick up in store — has become a fixture among cutting-edge retailers over the past several years. But this holiday season has made 2019 the breakthrough year for BOPIS. There’s rising demand among consumers for this handy shopping option. And retailers, seeing how the tactic benefits them as well, are stepping up to meet that demand.
Centro Teams with CannaVu to Bring Geo-Targeting to Cannabis and Normalize the Sector
Centro develops enterprise-class software for digital advertising organizations. CannaVu operates an ad exchange for cannabis and CBD marketers. Together, these two companies are working to change the way cannabis brands advertise online and break down the barriers that have slowed industry growth.
Then vs. Now: 10 Years of Local Search
David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal offer their take on a decade in local search. Among other topics, they take stock of Google’s dominance.
Mike: Now, it seems that the battle to become the hegemon of local has been signed, sealed, and delivered by Google not just in the US but worldwide. Their well-played hand with Android seems to have been the push they needed. And they managed to gain a totally dominant position IN SPITE of the Google Plus fiasco, which started around that time.
David: Google Plus! I’d honestly forgotten about that debacle already. In our little corner of the world, the fact that Google could waste all those years, person hours, and billions of dollars developing Google Plus and still ascend to its current position in local search shows you just what a colossal opportunity Facebook has missed in this space.
2020: The Year Publishers and Brands Truly Challenge the Walled Gardens
We’ve already started to see publishers and brands start to adopt technology that is beyond the reach of the walled gardens. For brands and publishers reexamining their relationships with the walled gardens, the new year is a great time to determine which channels are adding value and are also future-proof. Only those who own first-party data will be in a position to thrive and fight back against industry changes.
The Premise for Progress in a CCPA Era: Permission, Protection, and Privacy
In the aftermath of fresh privacy legislation, disruptive technologies are beginning to emerge as a possible salvation to the existential challenge the advertising industry faces today. Blockchain, the distributed ledger technology celebrated for its structural logic of transparency and trust, has the profound potential to move the needle on some of the most opaque segments of the digital media supply chain. Data portability, a fundamental right of any subject under the view of data privacy laws, can facilitate the way individuals regain usage of their personal data without risking exposure to the underlying consumer data set. In another instance, blockchain can efficiently track, manage, and record consent among data subjects, processors, and controllers.
LBMA Presents Location Weekly: Google Focuses on Local, DeliveryHero Buys Woowa Brothers
This week we’re discussing DeliveryHero buying Woowa Brothers for $4B, Mad Systems being granted a patent for location-based facial recognition platform, Lyft entering the car rental market for $35/day, Walmart teaming with Digimarc to make its print toy catalogue shoppable, Google focusing on local and PlaceIQ & FourthWall Media partnering to link TV ads with in-store visits.
Mobile Trends Set to Hit the US in 2020
2019 was a hectic year for many in the social and technology spaces, and we expect that theme to carry into 2020: the “new normal” will become just “normal.” We are optimistic about this new year but also foresee some systemic changes as to how mobile technology will continue transforming our lives while allowing us more control.
Heard on the Street, Episode 41: Tracking Real-World Intelligence, with Blis
One of the most consequential topics to emerge in local commerce in 2019 (and our upcoming editorial focus for the month of January) is the location-based ad industry’s looming privacy winter. Due to regulations like CCPA, as well as privacy restrictions at the mobile OS level, the bar will be raised for collecting location and movement data.
That could likewise raise barriers to entry in location-intelligence and even lead to a market shakeout, considering the abundance of companies that have entered the space in the past few years. One of the longstanding players that will vie for market share is London-based Blis.
Free and Premium Loyalty Programs Can and Should Coexist
Brands like Lululemon and Restoration Hardware have strong, headline-making loyalty programs with annual fees upwards of $100. But thousands of brands also have free, points-based loyalty programs — can the two coexist in a single brand?
The short answer: Yes. With shoppers’ desire for richer experiences and more valuable rewards and retailers’ need to gather data to support these desires, a blend of both premium and free loyalty is an advantageous route.
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