News and Analysis
Vibenomics Survey: Retail Shoppers Prioritizing Price Above All Else
Tradition, loyalty, and nostalgia have long been hallmarks of holiday shopping. Until now. According to a survey by the audio OOH advertising firm Vibenomics, inflation-weary consumers are prioritizing price above all else in holiday shopping this year. Surveying more than 1,000 consumers, the new Vibenomics survey found that 59% of shoppers plan to look for […]
Commentary
Location Weekly: Walmart’s Grocery Partnership with Yahoo Mail
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Walmart partnering to let people buy groceries through Yahoo Mail, Iceland’s Airport using sensors and AI to streamline passenger flow, a project between Trident and Instagram that can get you to the Grammy’s, and MUJI taking their products to the mountains.
Why You Need to Build a Data Governance Team Right Now
In today’s climate in which consumer and regulatory expectations change so quickly, data governance is increasingly becoming a necessary function for all businesses leveraging consumer data.
GDPR, CCPA, and future state and federal privacy laws force brands, agencies, tech vendors, and data providers to either comply or face fines and other legal action. Without a data governance team to operationalize and manage their consumer data assets, they put themselves at extreme risk of losing competitive advantage or of being put out of business altogether.
The All But Inevitable Outcome of the Facebook Advertiser Boycott
The boycott may yet exert some meaningful pressure on Facebook to change its ways, but that outcome is unlikely. This is partly due to the dynamics of the advertising market itself but also to the global scale of Facebook’s business and the essential role end consumers must play in any boycott. It’s worth examining each of these factors in turn.
Latest Posts
7 Location Analytics Firms for Malls and Shopping Centers
If you want to see what retail innovation looks like first-hand, walk into a shopping mall. Faced with the option to transform or die, shopping mall operators across the country are choosing to fight back against the shifting tides in retail.
Here are seven tech firms that malls, and other retail giants, are relying on to collect and study location data gleaned from shoppers’ mobile devices.
Announcing Judges for Street Fight’s Innovator Awards
Applications for this year’s Street Fight Innovator Awards have been open for the past month and will run through this coming Friday, July 26. So, get your applications in if you haven’t already. Meanwhile, we’re excited to announce the latest milestone in the awards process: the first round of all-star judges.
Each judge was selected because he or she is a recognized innovator in local marketing. The rest of the judges, including representatives from the Street Fight editorial team, will be announced soon to round out the full panel.
Spotlight On: Creative Testing Best Practices for Q3 2019
User acquisition advertising is evolving rapidly. Every quarter for the last few years, either Facebook or Google has made significant changes to their platforms that make it more and more possible to automate user acquisition advertising. Because these changes are available to everyone, competition has increased. Any competitive advantage that third-party ad tech tools had given is gone.
The last thing the machines have not automated or started to automate – creative – ends up being a UA manager’s last competitive advantage.
This makes every aspect of creative vital to success.
The History and Value of Citations, or Citations are Dead, Long Live the Citation
Mihm to Blumenthal: Setting aside the fact that the vast majority of calls you receive from non-Google directories are from salespeople, if you’re paying for an expensive citation service with analytics, compare the non-Google numbers to your GMB Insights. It’s going to be a drop in the bucket.
It’s time that every brand, regardless of size, ask itself whether going beyond Google, Facebook, and maybe Yelp is worth paying any premium.
If a tree falls in the citation forest and no customers are there to see it, not only does it not make a sound, but Google doesn’t care that it fell.
Third-Party Data and Third-Party Cookie Are Not the Same
Google’s recent announcement that it will change how its Chrome browser handles cookies has created some confusion about the impact on advertisers and ad tech platforms, particularly around the creation, selling, and buying of third-party data. Unfortunately, much of the confusion stems from a lack of clarity on the key terms.
Although third-party data and third-party cookies sound similar, they are very different things. I often find that marketers and media confuse the two.
Data Trends with the Highest Impact In 2019
At the beginning of the year, we like to take time and speculate on which data science trends will make the biggest splash in the year. Now that we’re entering the second half of 2019, it is a good time to take a look at our initial assumptions regarding these trends and re-evaluate each one’s impact on the industry.
LBMA Vidcast: Zeta Global and PlaceIQ, Amazon’s Delivery Innovation
On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: U.S. Army #InOurBoots VR recruiting, Transport for London using WiFi tracking, Havaianas shoppable boardwalk, McDonald’s Sweden’s QR picnic blanket, Zeta Global takes over PlaceIQ’s ad business, Amazon’s employee incentive for creating delivery start-ups.
The Deceptive Arguments Amazon Uses to Shirk Responsibility for AI
In a recent column, Recode founder and New York Times columnist Kara Swisher cut to the core of what would seem to be concessionary calls for regulation from Big Tech firms, summarizing their attitude like this: “We make, we break, you fix.” She’s right, and with Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook doubling their combined lobbying spending from 2016 to $55 million in 2018, it is worth taking a closer look at the kinds of arguments the companies are trotting out to avoid responsibility for the outcomes of the technology they produce and sell. We should be particularly concerned about the arguments tech firms are making about AI, which is already remaking our society, replacing steps in crucial human decision-making processes with machine-generated solutions.
For an example of how tech firms are attempting to get away with peddling potentially dangerous AI-based tech to powerful entities like law enforcement agencies while accepting minimal accountability, consider Amazon’s Rekognition.
Connecting the Customer Journey from Online to Offline
The blurring lines among search, social, and e-commerce only muddy the water when it comes to determining the customer’s journey to conversion. So, how can advertisers accurately attribute their marketing dollars to customer wins? Increasingly, marketers are turning to a multi-touch attribution strategy that includes both online and offline conversions, thereby moving away from simplistic last-touch attribution models.
Mobile Is Always Local: Thoughts on the Future of Online-to-Offline Commerce
The other day, Uber Eats announced a new service that struck me at first as a little surprising but, once I absorbed the idea, seemed strangely inevitable. In select cities like Austin and San Diego, you can now order food ahead of time, monitor your order status, and arrive at the restaurant just in time to begin dining, your table ready and waiting for you. This on-demand dine-in service is meant to remove time and effort from the experience of eating out, and it may also help restaurants fill empty tables during off-peak times by enabling special time-based incentives.
When I say it seems inevitable that an app would eventually “solve” waiting for your food at restaurants, I have two things in mind. The first is a quote from Twitter co-founder Ev Williams that, to me, strikes at the root of contemporary trends in innovation. The second point I want to observe here is that the highly representative user experience created by Uber Eats is taking place on a mobile phone.
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The Road Ahead: What Autonomous Cars Teach Us About Marketing Automation