News and Analysis
FAT Brands Serves Up a Charitable Venture
Charitable giving is on the upswing, and consumer shopping behavior and multi-location brands can sway perception via charity-related campaigns. But “doing good can go bad” when companies launch charity efforts without being thoughtful and transparent. That’s why multi-location FAT Brands put significant thought and effort into creating its newly-launched FAT Brands Foundation. Philanthropy tied to a […]
Survey: Retailer Apps Are Embraced by 78% of Consumers Worldwide
Retailer apps are having a moment, one that will likely get even bigger. According to a survey of 11,000 consumer respondents conducted by Airship, a mobile-app management platform that has worked with brands including the BBC, GameStop, McDonald’s, and Vodaphone, 78 percent of respondents said they use retail mobile apps for shopping. The percentage of […]
Report: Requests to Protect Personal Data Up 72%
While Congress debates TikTok’s future, U.S. consumers are beginning to ask some uncomfortable questions about why businesses are collecting their personal data and how their information is really being used. According to the newly-released Privacy Trends 2023 Report by DataGrail, the privacy management firm, concern over data privacy is reaching a fever pitch. Eighty-five percent […]
Commentary
As Political Messaging Shifts to CTV, Email Backs Up Campaigns
In a loud election where social media is overrun with fake news and unsolicited user-created opinions, campaigns must communicate in a consistent and streamlined way with voters, serving only ads that they want to see in their preferred channels. Campaigns might not win a voter on one issue but could sway or motivate them on another if they know what resonates with them.
This election year, the power of email should not be underestimated.
Google My Business Posts: Your Unexpected Holiday Hero
We’re in an era that allows enterprise businesses to tap into the API and upload Google Posts at scale (with help from a local platform management partner). Year-round, businesses can feature new product launches, new store openings, in-store events, and more, but perhaps one of the best times of year to leverage this space is during the months of November and December, when shoppers are gearing up for the holiday season.
Let’s walk through the top five best uses for Google Posts over the holiday season.
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.
Latest Posts
Where to Go from Here: The Outlook for Programmatic Advertising in 2020
eMarketer recently estimated that U.S. advertisers spent nearly $60 billion on programmatic display in 2019, and over the next two years, continued investment in areas like connected TV and OTT will drive programmatic ad spending to $80 billion.
As the ad industry launches into 2020, the ever-evolving programmatic landscape will introduce a fresh set of opportunities and challenges that will shape strategy in the new year. Here’s what to expect.
January Focus: Pursuing Privacy
As we straddle the precipice of a new year and a new decade, the next milestone in privacy legislation looms: the California Consumer Privacy Act. As California’s version of GDPR, it is the first major US privacy legislation. It will set a precedent and kick-start a domino effect for other states and may even lead to federal data privacy moves.
“Pursuing privacy” will be Street Fight’s editorial focus for the month of January. You may have noticed our monthly themes: December focused on the connected consumer, November’s focused on holiday shopping, October on local commerce verticals, and September on mapping (more on those in a bit).
The Core 4 Digital Marketing Challenges Multi-Location Brands Experience — And The Tech Solution
One particular area that’s difficult to navigate for multi-location companies is how to best serve highly targeted marketing campaigns to local customers across hundreds or thousands of very unique communities where your retail locations exist. Across the many multi-location brands at which I’ve worked, including national retailer Batteries Plus Bulbs, it’s an issue with which our internal marketing teams and outside ad agencies struggled.
In this article, I’ll identify four main marketing challenges I believe all multi-location retail marketers can relate to and how to use technology to solve them.
Retailers Find New Marketing Opportunities with Wearables
A recent announcement that Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance are working on an open-source network standard is likely to lead to even more investment in connected devices among retailers. The open-source network that the group is working to develop is supposed to make life easier for IoT hardware vendors and software developers, but it also serves a secondary purpose of assuring retailers investing in connected technology that their budgets aren’t being wasted. With a common IoT communication and control standard, smart devices will be even more reliable and seamless to use in the coming years.
“Open source will bring businesses more agility and enable them to process data quickly while simultaneously producing valuable insights,” says Heikki Nousiainen, chief technology officer at Aiven, a firm that develops managed cloud service hosting for software infrastructure services.
SEO Trends for 2020 That You Need to Know
In 2020, we can only expect the competition for the attention of Internet audiences to become even more intense. More and more businesses appear each day, all raring to get to the top of the search results.
Add to that the fact that search engines, Google in particular, will continue to make changes to their algorithms in the coming year. SEOs must be on their toes to stay on top of the latest SEO trends. Here are some of the changes, which include the further ascendance of video, voice, and mobile as well as premiums on longer content and possible openings for non-Google search engines.
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.
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