News and Analysis

Yelp Provides Peek into Local Commerce Misinformation and Other Bad Practices

Yelp Provides Peek into Local Commerce Misinformation and Other Bad Practices

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Everyone tuned into local commerce knows that fraudulent local reviews are a problem. But how big is the problem, and what can marketers and platforms do to diminish it?

Study: Consumers Skittish on Spending in 2023

Study: Consumers Skittish on Spending in 2023

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Strong labor markets and a growth in wages have helped consumers maintain spending on discretionary items until now, but a new study released by the National Retail Federation and Affinity Solutions paints a less optimistic picture of the year ahead.

Catalina Collaborates on In-Store Promotions with Kroger’s 84.51° Labs

Catalina Collaborates on In-Store Promotions with Kroger’s 84.51° Labs

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The shopper intelligence firm Catalina and Kroger’s retail data and analytics unit, 84.51°, are collaborating on a solution that will deliver Kroger’s digital promotional offers to customers who shop exclusively in-store.

Commentary

How the Pandemic Will Impact Holiday Shopping

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The holiday season is among the most active shopping periods of the year. In 2020, pay particular attention to consumer budgets, earlier in-season sales and messaging, digital channels for holiday deliveries, and digital experiences for families celebrating at a distance. 

TripleLift Partners with White Ops to Fight Ad Fraud

The Hidden Costs of Mobile Ad Fraud

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Some businesses treat the problem of ad fraud as a “tax,” considering it to be an unavoidable cost of digital advertising. Fraudsters siphon up to 30% of any given advertiser’s budget using a variety of tactics, such as app install farms or click spoofing. 

While this wasted spend is certainly of consequence, accepting ad fraud as a tax of doing business assumes that your drained budget is the only side effect (an inherently flawed approach). Ad fraud, if left to run rampant, poses additional threats to your performance and business.

3 Technologies to Support Retail’s Touchless Era

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When we return to shopping in physical stores, will that look different? It’s hard to imagine there will be as much much merchandise handling as before. Will it be a “touchless” environment? And if so, which technologies will power the touchless future?

Let’s dive into a few candidates.

Latest Posts

Combating Ad Fraud with Cutting-Edge Tech

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It’s no secret that ad fraud is a major hurdle for digital advertisers, sapping billions annually from marketing budgets. As digital advertising continues to receive higher cuts of marketing budgets, the pressure on ad platforms to deliver legitimate and high-quality campaigns to their customers has never been greater. At the same time, marketers must be increasingly aware and choosy in how and where they run their digital campaigns in order to avoid the perils of ad fraud.

There are plenty of ad traps out there, but savvy marketers and publishers alike can implement a number of digital checkpoints to not only keep ad fraud at bay, but also optimize what is working and maximize profits for both parties. 

Building Customer Loyalty: Is Texting the Answer?

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In today’s fast-paced world, we depend on our phones to help us get things quickly and easily. So, is texting the answer to building customer loyalty? Short answer: yes. Long answer: also yes, but it matters how you use it.

For appointment-based businesses, efficiency and simplicity are key to keeping customers engaged and coming back for more. Integration with online booking, improving gift card sales, and managing scheduling requests are three simple avenues that can have a big impact on building your business’ customer loyalty program. 

The Trust Crash: How Our Platforms Are Failing Us At Every Level and What We Can Do About It

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It doesn’t have to be this way. There are the seeds of a new generation of open platforms and technologies aimed at evolving the platform paradigm to one of transparency, value share, and universal governance representation. Sharing value with users via data revenue share; allowing users access to insights generated about them and their peers and help to understand who is trying to engage with them and why; rev share and benefits for service providers; collaborative governance; and abolition of unilateral platform expulsion or rule changes are just several of the major changes on the table. A whole host of new open platform operating protocols is emerging.

LBMA Vidcast: Walmart Launches Alcohol Pick-Up; Salesforce Teams with Neura

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On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Neura + Salesforce, do it outdoors media partners with BlueBite, NinthDecimal adds Inscape TV data, Eatigo (Thailand) matches restaurant deals with customers, Yoplait using facial detection for free offers with JCDecaux, Walmart launches alcohol pick-up in 2,000 US locations.

How CPGs Can Score a Touchdown This Fall by Emulating Spiked Seltzer’s 2019 Summer Splash

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In a way, local football fandoms are microcosms for the communities they represent. Each franchise fandom possesses a deeply rooted culture — the kind of loyalty and camaraderie marketers strive to inspire among their own consumers. From high school matchups and college games to the national stage and beyond, the opportunity to tap into local sports to forge meaningful connections with consumers is conspicuous. The strategies and tactics to go about creating those connections, though, is far from obvious. 

To home in on a seasonally relevant, hyperlocal strategy for tailgating and football, brand marketers can look to the strategies hard seltzer brands implemented that resulted in the overwhelming successes of the past summer. 

Heard on the Street, Episode 38: Can Local Events Galvanize Location Intelligence?

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“People’s attendance to events conveys a deeper and much richer signal to their actual interests and passions,” said Gravy Analytics CEO Jeff White on the latest episode of Heard on the Street. “Twenty years of having this thing called a digital cookie to create deeper, richer experiences online based on behavior online, we simply believe that if we can understand the events that people attend, that’s a much deeper and richer signal. So it can be a pride event … or it’s attendance to any of your favorite passionate things: wine tastings or otherwise, we just anchor on that and try to glean aggregated consumer insights.”

6 Trends to Watch in Holiday Search Marketing

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With fewer than two months to go until Christmas, retailers are already kicking their holiday search marketing tactics into high gear. Holiday sales this year are expected to increase roughly 4% over 2018, according to the National Retail Federation, and consumers are expected to be especially price-conscious. How will the retail industry respond to the changing dynamics in search marketing?

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest trends expected to influence holiday search marketing this year, from tactics for extending the local reach of holiday campaigns and how those tactics convert customers at the point of decision to newer products like Local Inventory Ads, which allows marketers to feed store-level inventory into Google search.

Google’s Fitbit Purchase: Peek into Next-Level Local Dominance and Healthcare Hacking

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Prescriptions by Google, then? The company indeed lacks Amazon’s delivery capabilities but has a stranglehold on search and therefore on consumers’ connections to local businesses. It is not hard to imagine a world in which Google appears to keep its privacy promise by refusing to sell ads directly based on Fitbit user data but still capitalizes on the data by using it to connect Fitbit users with local health care service providers, pharmacists, and even gyms. That would just constitute one more way Google is edging out the digital middlemen that once closed the loop from Google search to a local service provider.

Defining Your Purpose: 4 Ways to Optimize Purpose-Driven Marketing

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Ultimately, ensuring the success of purpose-driven campaigns comes down to building meaningful connections using all the technology, data, and creativity at one’s disposal to reach the elusive double bottom line. Here are four tips that can help marketers tap into data and technology to optimize their purpose-driven campaigns:

In Fitness Industry, Vertical Platforms Cater to Specialized Operations

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Online appointment booking platforms are a dime a dozen, used by businesses in a huge range of industries. But among fitness businesses, specifically, general use booking platforms aren’t very common. That’s because fitness businesses are more likely to use vertical-specific tools designed to meet the needs of specialized operations.

Perhaps more so than any other industry, health and wellness has shown a great desire for verticalized technology solutions. Although verticalization isn’t limited to the health and wellness industry, fitness studios and related businesses are much more likely to use technology platforms designed specifically for their industry.