News and Analysis
Grocers Grapple with Reaching Middle-Market Shoppers
Of all the categories of retail shoppers, one stands out as being particularly difficult to reach — the middle-market shopper. Neither price sensitive nor premium, middle-market shoppers are unpersuaded by the availability of cheaper or more sustainable options. To engage this elusive group, one-to-one marketing is the only reliable option.
Commentary
How Brands Meet Evolving Customer Expectations with Creative Automation
What customers want from brands is transparency, product information, and available services. Tell audiences about new curbside pickup or what you’re doing to make deliveries safer. Think of how you are removing friction and easing customers’ worry and then speak about it, because not only are they listening, but they’re also paying attention to those who haven’t gotten it right.
Aside from finding the right story angle for customers, many marketing and in-house creative teams are struggling to produce enough new assets and push them quickly out the door, especially as they adjust to remote work. Here are some of the most common challenges brand-side creative teams face during these times and how creative automation can help overcome them.
Snapchat’s “Promote Local Place”: The Deeper Dive
Snapchat’s 200 million users can now use Snap Map to find businesses in addition to finding friends. These two activities can go hand in hand if friends are discovered nearby on the map when users are planning local adventures.
But what matters most for local is that Snap will now let businesses promote themselves in the map interface, adding a key option for local advertising. This will happen on a self-serve basis for both SMBs and multi-location brands.
Latest Posts
How CPGs Can Thrive on Amazon
Amazon already uses its most valuable weapon — its own internal data — to compete with its own suppliers. It analyzes customer behavior around noted CPG brands, key market sectors, and private-label offerings from brands that sell on its platform to make decisions about where to launch its own private labels.
What can CPGs do to make it a win-win?
Klos Founders See Opportunity in Social Messaging Market
Like so many other startups, Klos is being marketed as a solution to a problem. In this case, the company’s founders see the problem as social media being inherently anti-social. Original broadcast sharing on legacy social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is on the decline. Messaging services like WhatsApp and iMessage are incredibly popular, but they don’t help people expand their social networks. While there are existing services, like Tinder and Bumble, that combine messaging and network expansion, they almost all fall into the dating app category.
A Return to Contextual Advertising?
Digital advertising and marketing have long been positioned as “the future” of advertising. But with the rapid changes in media and information technology of the past two decades, the future has arrived. Google recently promoted the idea that “we’re now in an era where digital marketing is just marketing.” But as the industry advances and as new protective regulations around personal data privacy are introduced, it’s also possible that some of the change could involve relying more on previously established methods. Specifically, it is possible that we are on the verge of a return to contextual advertising as the dominant form of online ads.
Letter From the Editor: Mapping the Future of Local Commerce
Of all of the technologies and consumer touchpoints to local commerce, mapping is perhaps the most relevant. This centuries-old technology has gone into hyperdrive over the past 15 years since the launch of Google Maps, and it continues to be a primary tool for local search and discovery.
But what’s the state of the art and how is it evolving? This will be Street Fight’s focus in the month of September. This follows last month’s connected car theme and past months’ reporting and commnetary on privacy, retail transformation and the “beyond the screen” evolution of voice and visual search.
Making the Case for Driver-Centric Location Solutions in Cars of the Future
Traditionally, a lot of discussion around location tech as it relates to auto is for marketing and media applications for the dealerships and automakers themselves, where the goal is to sell more cars. That helps the OEM and the dealers, but it leaves an enormous opportunity on the table. We also need to be customer-centric, which means providing an experience that decommoditizes ownership and makes the journey itself a little more interesting. That’s how to keep the miles-traveled metric high, even when fewer cars are being sold.
Applying user data in this fashion requires adherence to a code of data privacy and ethics — starting with a clear and obvious value exchange to the end user (the driver). An owner of a vehicle should clearly understand the benefit in having location data collected. Location data can improve the driver’s experience in three ways.
How VR and AR Are Changing the Car-Buying Experience
New cars are incredibly expensive, and most people don’t feel comfortable picking a vehicle based exclusively on two-dimensional images and whatever data they can pull up on the Kelley Blue Book website. Consumers don’t want to go into dealerships, either, so they end up delaying their purchases for as long as possible.
RelayCars thinks it has a solution.
The company has put together a program that uses augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to help consumers research new cars and trucks. Getting a realistic view of a vehicle from their own homes helps users narrow down their selections and decreases the time shoppers need to spend test driving multiple cars.
The Retail Fight Against Showrooming
If showrooming didn’t make brick-and-mortar retail obsolete, it’s definitely disrupting it for the better. The question is what brands need to do to survive and thrive through this transition. The answer lies in omnichannel marketing and sales, which is a many-pieced puzzle. Let’s explore what that means and why showrooming took off in the first place.
3 Reasons Facebook CPMs are Exploding
There are many issues that are causing the cost of advertising on Facebook to go up, but the benefits of Facebook advertising — reaching a logged-in audience with highly targeted and measurable campaigns — isn’t restricted to just Facebook. It’s time for marketers to diversify their ad spend and turn elsewhere to reach new audiences with a high return.
Heard on the Street, Episode 33: Building Network Effect for Location Intelligence
Responsible location intelligence involves practices like “stop data,” to measure users’ location dwell times, and the scale Foursquare achieves in its network of app publishers. Placed is one of the first location data players and a leader in attribution since 2011.
Now that the two companies have come together via acquisition, how does that position Foursquare for interstellar domination of the location intelligence market? It’s about greater capability and scale, say Foursquare’s Josh Cohen and David Shim, our guests on the latest episode of Heard on the Street.
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