News and Analysis
Pinterest Leads the Charge on Shoppability
Even as Instagram pulls back on live shopping, another social platform is diving in further: Pinterest. The company has slowly leaned into shoppability over the past few years with more transactional features for direct commerce. Those moves include a “Shop” tab where products within videos and pins are shoppable. And on the merchant-facing end, Pinterest […]
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Location Weekly: Walmart Delivers Covid Tests via Drone
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Walmart delivering Covid tests via drone in Vegas, United Airlines launching an interactive flight search map, Amazon Sidewalk moving beyond the connected home, and Toronto-based WXM Tech cooking up TraffikFlo for Covid traffic management.
How McDonald’s is Using AI in Marketing to Better Understand Customers’ Needs
McDonald’s waited until it could produce an AI-driven app that provides customers with personalized deals based on their purchasing history. In other words, McDonald’s bet on quality over quantity. This, of course, is just one of the ways that AI presents opportunities and challenges alike in regards to martech.
As we’ve previously noted, as AI adoption increases, brands are searching for a competitive edge. McDonald’s is no exception to this, and a look at how the company is using AI is instructive as to the opportunities AI presents for other firms.
Forever-Changed Buying Patterns Mean Rethinking Customer Loyalty
Online ordering and curbside pick-up became an essential service for everyone from major retailers like Home Depot and Target to restaurants and small specialty shops. Bookstores began delivering orders without a delivery fee. Even car dealerships have had to rethink their entire sales model, with many moving the full customer experience online.
While these business transitions were driven by the pandemic, the new consumer buying trends — and the business measures put in place to adapt to them — will likely become a permanent fixture even as the economy enters a recovery phase.
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Carriers, It’s Time to Weld the Lid Shut on Customers’ Data
Personalization and privacy seem inherently at odds. After all, media companies such as Facebook act like vacuum hoses for data – collecting much more than they need. That’s problematic in a world where data breaches dominate headlines nearly every week. However, where Facebook and others go low, mobile carriers can go high. In fact, mobile carriers that aim to be media companies have a huge opportunity to respect privacy while providing great personalization in their original content.
So, how can carriers take this high road — that is, deliver personalized content experiences without storing consumers’ personal information? By focusing on the device itself – leveraging local storage and client-side execution (rather than requiring server interaction) to help carriers deliver a personalized experience that is incredibly safe. This allows carriers to implement the industry-changing trend of device-centric discovery (DCD), which makes it easy for subscribers to find news/sports/entertainment/games without having to wade through multiple apps and searches. With DCD, carriers can create personalized content experiences that don’t expose subscribers’ personal data to external privacy risks, and in the process, become mobile media leaders.
December Focus: The Connected Consumer
When looking at several interlocking tech trends — wearables, IoT, smart devices, autonomous vehicles — one common thread emerges: our escalating connectivity as humans. All these technologies are increasingly melded with our senses as the computing “abstraction layer” diminishes.
In other words, device interfaces continue to get more intuitive and automatic. That can be seen in the progression of personal computing from UI milestones like the mouse to mobile-centric touch controls. Now, we have biometric tracking on the Apple Watch and ambient alerts to AirPods.
The “connected consumer” will be Street Fight’s editorial focus for the month of December.
LBMA Vidcast: PayPal to Acquire Honey; Apple Teams with PlayNetwork
On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Mobivity launching omnichannel offer platform with Subway, Apple teaming with PlayNetwork for retail music, PayPal to acquire Honey for $4B, Tesco’s One Stop launches AR game, JCPenney opening new store with barbershop and styling, and CVS + Weather Channel team-up on AI flu predictions.
The Beauty Industry is Prepping for Small Business Saturday – Here’s How
Small Business Saturday is one of the most important events of the year for local beauty and wellness providers. Spas and salons rely on sales of gift cards and beauty products to sustain their businesses during leaner times.
Developed by American Express in the depths of the recession in 2010, Small Business Saturday is placed in the middle of two of the biggest shopping events of the year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. While proportionally fewer sales happen on Small Business Saturday than Black Friday or Cyber Monday, consumer awareness around the annual event is growing.
The Risks and Outsize Rewards of Political Branding
In a time of unprecedented political partisanship, the risks and rewards of corporate political messaging are amplified. Viral marketing strategies including Nike’s partnership with racial justice activist and football star Colin Kaepernick, Gillette’s toxic masculinity ad, and Chick-fil-A’s anti-LGBTQ stances rally political sympathizers to a brand’s side and alienate ideological foes.
Street Fight checked in with Jen Capstraw, director of strategic insights and evangelism at growth marketing company Iterable, to get a sense of how significant the benefits and drawbacks of political branding are, which ideological direction political ads are predominantly taking, and how strong the evidence is for the efficacy of partisan messaging.
Valuing Diversity, Gen Z Searches for Tailor-Made Holiday Experiences
Gen Z shoppers, in particular, have more friends with different races, gender identities, and sexualities than previous generations. They are more likely to be influenced by social media stars, who come from a wide variety of backgrounds, than traditional Hollywood celebrities. As a result, members of this generation value diversity more than other generations, and that value influences their purchasing decisions year-around.
“If you look at baby boomers from this lens, they’re far more homogenous. Millennials and Gen Z are the antithesis [of] homogeneity,” Hebets says. “Brands need to understand that millennials and Gen Z don’t want to be put in the traditional box with respect to marketing or otherwise. They want brands to embrace and recognize their diversity.”
Retailers Wooing Holiday Shoppers Try AI On for Size
What if e-commerce retailers could use technology to replicate the role of the in-store sales associate, providing people at home with the type of personal attention that really drives sales?
Technology vendors are working feverishly to make that a reality. Using artificial intelligence and voice assistants, like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, and Siri, online retailers are beginning to imagine a world where shoppers can ask their voice companions for recommendations on product fit or gift suggestions in specific price ranges. There may even be a time, not too far in the future, when shoppers can get personal feedback during try-ons inside their own closets, thanks to “smart” mirrors and other virtual reality technology.
5 Pointers for Driving Performance with Brand-to-Brand Partnerships
Leading brands are realizing that it is no longer sustainable to rely on the old paradigm of large, brand-to-brand collaborations. To elevate their business and up their partnerships game, brands need to expand their understanding of who a partner is, how more relationships can be managed efficiently at scale, and why performance-based compensation is the future of partner marketing.
Here are five pointers brands need to consider when looking to grow through mutually beneficial brand partnerships.
New Brandify Survey Reveals Consumer Habits in Local Search
For Brandify’s local search consumer survey, consumers were asked to name the tools they’ve used in the last 30 days to find information about businesses nearby. Though a vast majority of 77% named Google Maps over any other tool, there was a significant “second tier” group including Facebook at 38%, Yelp at 35%, and business websites at 32%.
The study also asked consumers about the frequency of searches, the range of businesses for which they searched, preferred devices, and the likelihood of visiting a business after searching.
The Path to Agency Scale: Product, Sales, or Both?
David: I’ve been thinking quite a bit about our product mix at ThriveHive recently. And in particular the segmentation of the various offerings of our newly combined GateHouse/Gannett company by customer budget.
It has surprised me, frankly, that so few agencies seem to go to market with the essential digital marketing bundle for local businesses you and I proposed exactly two years ago. In re-reading that article, I’d still give the same advice today and with even more urgency based on the rollout of Local Service Ads.
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