News and Analysis
Clean Room Consortium Aims to Clarify How Advertisers Can Use the Technology
Adam Gelles, CEO of The B2B Marketing Company, and Richard Sobel, CEO of Mercato Solutions, founded the Clean Room Consortium as a sort of trade organization to help all stakeholders understand and best capitalize on the technology. We touched base on how advertisers and publishers are already using clean rooms and what the media community needs to know.
Commentary
Location Weekly: Burger King and Wawa Innovate for Covid Era
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Wawa launching drive-through-only convenience stores, Waze launching contactless gas payments at Shell and Exxon Mobil, Burger King printing customer orders on face masks, and Heineken launching its “Star of the Summer” campaign at Tesco UK.
Who’s Afraid of CCPA? Steps Toward Ethical Data Collection
The marketing and advertising communities are inherently about data collection. They survey and track people’s online behaviors to uncover a deeper understanding of trending sentiments. Through this, the ultimate goal is to help marketers better target the right audiences with messaging that will resonate with them on the platforms they typically frequent.
While data privacy should be a given considering how central it is to the industries at hand, it’s often still seen as a challenge to overcome. So, where is the problem?
How Covid-19 Is Speeding Up OOH Advertising’s Digital Transformation
Some OOH media providers have already moved beyond the traditional real estate-based approach in which advertisers focus on a specific region or even choose specific billboard locations. Instead, they are using data and technology to target specific audiences and measure the impact of their campaigns. For the laggards, the pandemic is proving a catalyst for overdue change. Let’s consider why OOH’s audience-based future is closer than ever as well as what is next for the industry’s evolution.
Latest Posts
Constant Contact Expands Beyond Email, Adds Website Builder for SMBs
Constant Contact, known for its email marketing platform, is expanding to offer an AI-driven website builder as well as tools for branding, productivity, and e-commerce. It’s the first major expansion for Constant Contact since its acquisition by Endurance International Group.
The company’s new website builder is specifically designed for SMB owners and operators without the time or expertise typically required to build an effective site from scratch. Constant Contact claims sites can be created in minutes.
Is Consent Enough to Make Audio Recordings Safe for Human Processing?
Recently, a number of high-profile tech firms have been uncovered permitting human employees to access private conversations consumers believed were only processed by AI.
Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa have all been placed in the limelight, and now Facebook has also come under fire for letting human employees access sensitive personal conversations for transcription purposes.
In the case of AI assistants, private conversations are primarily harvested from consumers who own and use their devices directly. However, there is an emerging body of evidence that these technologies are also harvesting secondary persons’ conversations — completely unknown to those individuals.
Shift in Gift-Giving Culture Speaks to Changes in Digital Commerce
At the heart of the shift in gift-giving culture is the rise of online shopping. While previous generations would take to their local shops or markets to find the perfect gifts, today the process is infinitely simpler thanks to online retail giants like Amazon. At the click of a button, Internet users can purchase a present to be sent directly to their (or, even better, the recipient’s) door. Indeed, this is how the majority of people appear to be approaching gift giving today; approximately three quarters of consumers in the UK say they now buy more than half of their Christmas presents online.
Captivate and Hivestack Partner to Expand Programmatic DOOH Ads
Location-based digital video network Captivate and location-based mar tech company Hivestack are teaming up to expand access to programmatic digital out-of-home ads, the companies announced.
Hivestack’s marketplace and ad exchange will allow customers to buy video inventory on Captivate, which will bring engaging video ads to offices across North America. Captivate offers a professional audience of particularly high interest to marketers.
Google Accelerating Its Path to the Transaction Layer of the Internet
Mihm to Blumenthal: Our mutual friend and Local U speaker Cindy Krum has long highlighted Google’s ambition to become the “presentation layer of the internet.”
It’s been apparent for the last four years that they want to take that one step further and become the “transaction layer of the internet,” as we’ve discussed in this space before.
A little birdie told me that you’re seeing that ambition accelerate.
How Retailers Use AI, Mapping to Boost ROI on Store Remodels
Walmart, Walgreens, and Sephora are all using artificial intelligence technology to improve the retail experience. While the majority of use cases for AI in retail have focused on enhancing the shopping experience for customers, forward-thinking analytics firms are innovating and developing new uses for their existing AI technology.
The analytics firm Fractal Analytics is pushing forward in the retail space with its own solution that relies on AI to forecast the cost of retail store remodels, as well as determine the ROI from large-scale renovation projects. Although Fractal works solely with Fortune 500 companies, the solutions it is developing could be adopted more broadly throughout the retail space.
Google Hit With Another $500+ Million Fine
Google is in the news for the wrong reasons again. The search giant agreed to pay a 500 million euro fine (about $550 million) to settle a French fiscal fraud probe after investigators in the country accused it of dodging taxes, Reuters reported.
Google’s headquarters are in Dublin, Ireland, where it settles all sales contracts to avoid paying higher taxes in the rest of Europe. Alphabet isn’t the only company to take advantage of tax loopholes to avoid paying its fair share; Apple and Facebook also have large operations there.
Uber Pledges to Fight California Contractor Bill
Uber and Lyft are already losing billions of dollars, and long-term concerns about whether they will ever hit profitability have endured, making for relatively weak runs on the public market. If the companies cannot come close to profitability with cheap labor forces without benefits, having to treat drivers as employees could pose an existential threat. At the very least, it may require Uber and Lyft to slow down expansion and rein in their ambitions, suggesting that the heyday (or hallucinatory days) of Web 2.0 could be coming to a close.
5 Cannabis Payroll Platforms
Growers, dispensaries, and other businesses that operate in the legal cannabis industry are caught between federal and state regulations, which make banking and payroll a challenge. Despite marijuana being legal in many states, cannabis businesses are still on shaky ground at the federal level, and banks in particular are skittish about partnering with the industry. Without solid banking partners, local cannabis businesses can have trouble keeping up on payroll. So what’s the solution?
Rather than waiting for Congress to make a decision on potential regulations that would shield banks from federal punishment for maintaining accounts for cannabis businesses, more dispensaries and growers are moving toward using web-based cannabis payroll platforms designed specifically for their industry.
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