News and Analysis

Ad Tech and Privacy

Retailers Bet on Digital Twin Technology

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Digital twin technology creates virtual models designed to reflect both online and physical systems, and it has captured the attention of the retail market.

grocery store

How the Kroger-Albertsons Merger Would Affect Retail Media

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If the Kroger-Albertsons merger ultimately goes through, it would create not just a new supermarket giant but a giant retail media network.  

Yelp’s Spotlight Ads Help National Brands at a Local Level

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A new ad product from Yelp is helping national and regional brands connect with consumers at the local level. 

Commentary

Yes, Brands Can Boycott Facebook — and Still Work with Influencers

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While you want to be safe, pausing your Influencer campaign altogether right now might not be the right move. Yes, even if you are boycotting Facebook, you can still work with Influencers. 

In fact, brands need to work with influencers in order to maintain a social and online presence and remain top of mind for consumers. This is especially critical now as mobile and social media consumption is up and online shopping is increasing, while budgets are up in the air and the election year crowds the marketplace.

food

Location Weekly: Walmart’s Grocery Partnership with Yahoo Mail

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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.

Ad Tech and Privacy

Why You Need to Build a Data Governance Team Right Now

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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.

Latest Posts

Half of Organizations Send the Wrong Marketing Messages to Customers

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The result of this data deluge? Organizations lack the insight into their customers they desperately need to deliver meaningful experiences, secure sales, and retain customers. New research estimates 48% of them struggle to gain these insights due to the data silos and more than half admit they don’t have a full picture of their marketing data and their customer journey.  

Given the many challenges marketers are up against, it’s no wonder they struggle to define their customer journeys and optimize customer interactions. Below I offer some advice for those in this data struggle.

Multi-Location Marketers Want to Do More Social Advertising, But One Big Thing Stands in the Way

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Unlike search, social is a push medium that marketers can use to reach new audiences. Social can leverage rich ad formats such as mouth-watering images of restaurant dishes, explainer videos for complex products, and eye-catching celebrity or influencer endorsements that are much more impactful and engaging at storytelling than search. 

Today’s local enterprise advertisers know that they should be leveraging the one-two punch of search and social together. One day they will. But until social advertising can offer the same streamlined workflow that can make managing hundreds or thousands of locations as easy as search makes it, social will still lag behind in the local marketing media portfolio. 

7 Cannabis Data Analytics Firms

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One of the signs that an industry is becoming more legitimate is when its major players start investing in analytics. With a recent boom in the number of data analytics firms entering the cannabis space, it’s time to reevaluate the landscape for recreational marijuana as a business.

The marijuana industry is expanding at a rapid pace. Analysts estimate the industry could reach $75 billion in global sales by 2030. With so much on the line and marijuana companies facing enormous pressure to innovate, investors are pushing for the increased use of data analytics to make more strategic business decisions.

Here are seven cannabis data analytics firms working to change the face of the industry right now.

First-Party Versus Third-Party Data: What You Should Know

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Using first-party data is a win-win. As marketers, you are fostering an ongoing relationship with your customers and prospects by better communicating and serving them. But there needs to be a strategy and long-term commitment. In a survey of US digital marketers by Advertiser Perceptions and programmatic agency MightyHive, respondents said they were, on average, tapping into just 47% of their company’s first-party data potential. It takes the right strategy and technological infrastructure in place to activate first-party data at scale.

7 Location Analytics Firms for Malls and Shopping Centers

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.