News and Analysis
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.
Commentary
How Brands Can Support the Safe Return of Youth Sports to Communities
As the school year kicks off virtually for many children and families across the nation, all eyes are turning to the possibility that youth sports could help provide much-needed activity, socialization, and emotional support during an otherwise overwhelming and disorienting time. Without a doubt, youth sports in a pandemic must look a lot different than they did in pre-pandemic times, but one thing is truer than ever: Brands can play a valuable role in helping youth sports return safely to the field and enabling the kids who need these activities the most to participate.
How E-Commerce Sites Can Remain Competitive in a Rapidly Accelerating Digital Age
Customer experience isn’t anything new, but new ideas can be applied here, especially in the digital space. The question now revolves around how to create the same welcoming environment you’d create in a physical store online. It can be as simple as choosing colors for your website to elicit certain moods or using certain tech features like a chatbot to welcome customers as they “enter” your store. And it’s about making sure that customers can find your store — and this is where our affiliates become a key part of our strategy.
Latest Posts
Revamping Your Strategy and Audiences for the Latest “Safe & Civil” Facebook Advertising Update
Your social advertising strategy and audiences may need a bit of an overhaul to align with updates to Facebook’s “Safe & Civil” Advertising Policies, especially if they fall within particular categories.
If your customer is running a campaign that does fall within one of the three categories upended by recent Facebook policy changes, it’s best to launch your campaign with a Special Ads Category applied prior to publishing. This will save you time and a headache resolving errors during the length of your campaign.
Believe the Hype: The Pragmatic Value of Location-Based Analytics, Audiences, and Attribution
After 25 years of framing technologies by level of maturity and adoption, the Gartner Hype Cycle has finally placed location intelligence for marketing where it belongs — in the trough of disillusionment. Sounds like a lousy place to be, but it’s actually the opposite. Why? The trough of disillusionment is the stage right before the slope of enlightenment. Let me back up and explain.
US Businesses Lead on Reputation Management
Loyalty to local businesses may never cease to be an important factor in brick-and-mortar commerce, but the boom of “near me” searches and the emphasis on convenience in the age of mobile search make a prime online presence for the quick-querying passerby more important than it has ever been. This latest Uberall data indicate that responding to reviews can provide the slight 5-star rating bump that guides an unfamiliar customer into a store she may otherwise pass up for a higher-ranked competitor.
5 Innovative Ways to Use AR in Holiday Marketing
A technology that was once considered to be on the fringes of digital marketing has moved into the mainstream, as retailers around the country find new ways to use AR in their 2019 holiday campaigns. From virtual try-ons to camera filters designed to drive people into physical store locations, there’s no limit to the number of ways creative marketers can use AR. Enterprising retailers are capitalizing on the momentum as they come up with smarter ways to help shoppers contextually visualize what products will look like on their bodies and in their homes.
Let’s take a look at how five major companies are using AR for holiday marketing this year.
Combating Ad Fraud with Cutting-Edge Tech
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?
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
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
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
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?
“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.”
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