News and Analysis
3 Ways AI Will Disrupt QSRs: Perspectives from Susan Sly
Susan Sly, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Radius AI (RAI), grew up in the restaurant business in Canada. That’s one of many reasons she has taken a humanistic approach to artificial intelligence, robotics, and technology, believing that if AI is properly executed it can empower retail, QSR, C-store, and other multi-location employees to become confident and […]
Trader Joe’s Tops Yelp’s Most-Loved Brands
Yelp released its first-ever most-loved brands list, and Trader Joe’s sits atop the 50 businesses. StreetFight spoke to Kadecia Ber, Yelp’s Advertising Trends Expert and Director of Multi-location Solutions, for more insights. Launched in 2004, Yelp.com is a destination for crowd-sourced reviews about various businesses, from restaurants and beauty salons to doctors and gym clubs […]
Retail has Changed. Composable Commerce Helps the Industry Keep Up
Today’s consumer is the one in control of the fulfillment experience. The modern shopper expects to be able to dictate their own terms from an array of options: store pickup vs. shipping; locker pickup; same-day delivery; and more. Retail legacy technology systems may not offer this degree of flexibility – but adding capabilities, either by […]
Commentary
Plan for Black Friday with this E-Commerce Holiday Checklist
Deloitte’s annual holiday retail forecast projects that e-commerce holiday sales will grow by 25% to 35% year over year, compared to a sales increase of 14.7% last year. Here’s a five-point holiday prep list to help ensure your digital commerce experiences stack up and are ready to engage the influx of shoppers this holiday season.
What’s Snapchat’s Local Play?
Snap continues to make moves in local commerce. Historic steps include geo-filters, while more recent activity includes Local Lenses and business listings in Snap Map. These features are notable on their own, but they get more interesting when you view them together and extrapolate to Snap’s local road map.
For example, Snap has more 13-34-year-olds active than any other channel, including Facebook and Instagram. This essentially means Snap can offer SMBs incremental and non-duplicated reach to an attractive audience.
Social Media is Not Enough: 3 Reasons Why Websites are a Must for Businesses
During the Covid era, the value of a website has increased exponentially. According to a recent survey, 82% of US small business owners find their website to be an essential part of their businesses’ success, and 54% reported a boost in website traffic since the beginning of quarantines.
Whether you’re a small business owner or someone with an idea, developing a website as your home base is beneficial to growing your customer base and online brand. Here’s why.
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How Much Consumers Value Transparent Privacy Practices
Potential legal troubles and CCPA’s enforceability weaknesses aside, the Tealium study suggests a strong record on privacy will be a boon to brands as privacy increasingly takes center stage in the public consciousness. Ninety-seven percent of consumers said they are at least somewhat concerned about data privacy, and 85% said they won’t forgive a company’s misuse of their data.
In 2020, Independent Publishers Must Invest in the Quality of their Brands
The door is far from closed to success in publishing, and there are clear paths to prosperity for newer and leaner independent and local outfits. Even as more and more ad dollars go to a handful of giants, publishers have a chance to turn the tide, provided they invest in talent, maintain the integrity of their brands, and build an audience advertisers find worth pursuing.
The California Consumer Privacy Act’s Promise and Limitations
At first glance, the California Consumer Privacy Act marks a major achievement for privacy advocates, the first statewide bill in the US to offer consumers control over how companies handle their personal information. It’s all the more significant that CCPA happened in California, a frequent bellwether for federal legislation and the state where many of the world’s top tech companies are headquartered.
It’s not entirely clear, though, that CCPA will put significant fetters on Silicon Valley’s hitherto unrestrained collection and monetization of user data. Major weaknesses include the law’s enforcement protocol, continued lobbying efforts to defang it, and its opt-out structure.
This Year, Brands Will Seek Out Incrementality
As networks, publishers, and agencies continue to shift to guarantee business outcomes in ad deals (a trend that began earlier in 2019), the concept of “incrementality” will emerge as a key issue for marketers in 2020.
Advertisers today have an incredibly difficult time distinguishing between those exposed to ads who were already going to visit the store (the natural effect, driven by intent and brand identity) vs. those who visited because of that exposure (the incremental effect, driven by ad sensitivity). Quite understandably, we want to know if our advertising campaigns actually work in changing consumer behavior in our favor.
The Marketing Landscape will Transform in 2020. Are You Ready?
Data privacy laws such as CCPA and GDPR are inevitably going to reshape the practice of marketing. In response, we will need to create new avenues to extract value from omnichannel data sources. We will have to use data in more creative ways for personalization that is sensitive to regulations and consumer demands.
We will refocus on optimizing new channels in the customer journey. Permission-based marketing, cognitive uplift, and transparency will be the buzzwords of the year. In some ways, the marketing industry might look fundamentally different this month than it did only weeks ago.
Here are my top predictions for the ways marketing will transform in 2020.
Tech Vendors See Opportunity in CCPA Compliance
The California Consumer Privacy Act has just recently gone into effect, and full enforcement won’t begin for another six months, but companies are already making big changes as they endeavor to ensure compliance.
Under the new CCPA regulations, companies are required to notify users of the intent to monetize their data and provide users with the ability to easily opt out of data monetization. Many companies are struggling to come into compliance, but for businesses that work with multiple technology vendors, the issue is creating even more headaches.
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.
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