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
iOS14 and Privacy: What it Means for Advertisers, Especially on Facebook
The latest in the tug of war between consumer privacy and effective digital advertising pits Apple against Facebook, Google, and others. At stake for ad tech: significant revenue for ad publishers and app developers, effective ad results for advertisers, and more relevant ads for consumers. At stake for users: consumer privacy protection, the use of their behavioral data for marketing, and possibly, the future of “free” software.
Apple’s pending release of iOS 14 is a strong consumer-privacy-first stance and a potential disruption to digital marketing as we know it. But what is the real impact for targeted digital advertising?
Standardizing the Definition of Data Quality
Now that companies are using data to drive marketing strategies, product development, and other key business decisions, stakeholders need to know more. They need to know whether data represents an intent signal or an interest signal. They have a right to know the honest origins of the data they’re using — whether it’s been pulled from bidstream or it’s truly opt-in data from a reliable publisher. They deserve to know that the data they’re using has been collected in a privacy-safe manner and if permission has been ethically obtained. Furthermore, business users should have some transparency around modelled data and declared data. They should have visibility into what’s inside each segment.
Despite Covid-19 Environment, Brick-and-Mortar Retailers May Have an Edge
A new survey of more than 1,400 U.S. consumers indicates that more than half are shopping less often and three-quarters are spending less at their favorite stores. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is what the research showed regarding opportunities for retailers to compete against the sheer competitive threat Amazon represents, and that includes the positive impact mobile couponing can have not just for online purchases but to drive in-store traffic as well.
Latest Posts
Consumerizing AI to Drive Stickiness and Usability
Organizations investing billions in enterprise software realized the obvious: that easier-to-use technology was not only more scalable internally, but that it delivered better ROI. Accessible platforms could be optimized faster and were “stickier” across teams. This gave way to the consumerization movement in IT and enterprise.
As we head into 2019, the enterprise’s consumerization is well established. Yet when it comes to AI, which will see over $235 billion in investment by 2025, this idea of consumer-like UI has largely fallen by the wayside.
That has to change.
3 Challenges Keeping Chief Growth Officers Up at Night
The role of the Chief Growth Officer is challenging enough without digital ad budgets getting upended. But that’s exactly what’s happening. Thanks to radical changes made by the three largest U.S. online ad platforms, the digital advertising ecosystem is undergoing a transformation, and it is forcing Chief Growth Officers to reconsider their marketing strategies. Here are three challenges keeping Chief Growth Officers up at night—and a straightforward solution for getting more sleep.
5 Proven Strategies for Ramping Up Your Mobile Coupon Marketing Program
The United States is one of the largest smartphone markets in the world, with some 96% of people owning a cellphone. Those consumers most likely to own a smartphone fall into the sweet spot of retail marketing demographics—those ages 18-29 (96%) and those ages 30-49 (92%), according to Pew Research. Retailers are realizing that mobile coupon marketing is the best way to get special offers in the hands of consumers.
Retailers that take advantage of the power of mobile marketing when combined with coupons have a new and effective means of driving foot traffic and purchases. Here we offer a look at five mobile coupon marketing strategies.
Heard on the Street, Episode 37: Redefining Location Intelligence
Beyond the advertising uses for location intelligence (ad targeting, attribution, etc.), it’s being applied to other areas of enterprise support. That includes everything from supply chain management to deciding where you should open your next store location.
“When you look at ad tech and sales and marketing, that’s where the money is now,” said Mike Davie, CEO of location Intelligence company Quadrant on the latest episode of Heard on the Street. “But we are seeing people get more sophisticated with use cases like infrastructure development [such as] where to put high-speed trains by analyzing migration between countries. They’re making billion-dollar infrastructure decisions based on ground-level information.
To Meet Consumer Demands, Automotive Marketing Goes Vertical
While customer feedback is coming in from every direction, the automotive industry has done a better job of funneling reviews into vertical-specific platforms than some other industries. Large auto retailers like AutoNation are making major data stack investments, while others are working to improve their online ratings and reviews by engaging more frequently on sites like Facebook and Yelp as well as on automotive-specific platforms like Cars.com and Edmunds.
Jump of 0.1 in Five-Star Review Averages Can Make the Difference on Conversion
When customers are looking for a quick fix and do not intimately know the shops around them, star-rating averages are crucial. A new report by location-based marketing firm Uberall indicates they are so influential in consumer decision-making processes that a mere 0.1-point jump in a store’s average rating can increase its conversion rate by 25%.
Get Ready for America’s GDPR: CCPA
With regulation comes the emergence of new opportunities. The same logic that brought on GDPR will be stateside on January 1, 2020, when the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is put into effect. This legislation will allow California residents more control over their personal data. The objective is simple: provide better consumer protections and enhance the respect of privacy by improving transparency regarding the way companies are using their users’ data.
Jean-Noël Barneron of Herow provides one of the clearest breakdowns of CCPA, going into effect Jan 1, you’ll read.
Three Ways Indoor Maps Do More for Complex Retail Buildings
Once a venue’s maps have been digitized for wayfinding purposes, there are many ways to drive additional ROI from that same set of indoor maps. When location technologies are designed with interoperability in mind, it becomes possible to blend different technologies together to create smart solutions that provide value not only to business operations but also to consumers. By integrating digitized, layer-based indoor maps with other solutions such as the indoor equivalent of GPS, known as Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS), asset tracking and business intelligence, great things become possible.
Here is a shortlist of the top use cases that malls can implement to generate further ROI from their indoor mapping investments.
How Can Brands Capitalize on Google’s Latest Ads Update?
Almost a month has passed since Google officially killed its ‘average position’ metric. The metric was retired on September 30, and marketers using Google Ads have been encouraged to transition to using ‘prominence metrics’—made up of the search top impression rate and search absolute top impression rate—instead. Google’s announcement was designed to give brands the opportunity to update their strategies before the average position metric was axed to hopefully make the transition a seamless process.
To understand how that transition is actually working in the real world, and how brands are adapting to the change from one metric to another, we connected with Walker Sands Digital’s Ryan Sorrell. A digital marketing expert with experience deploying competitive content analysis for B2B clients, Sorrell shared his thoughts on how Google’s decision to axe the average position metric will impact brands going forward and which new opportunities are at play as Google shifts its sights toward automated bidding strategies.
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