News and Analysis
What Marketers Can Learn from Black Friday
A possible recession isn’t freezing consumer spending — but it is pushing consumers toward discounts. That’s the takeaway from the signature bellwethers for holiday shopping, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which saw strong activity levels according to initial figures from Adobe Analytics.
Commentary
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.
Changing Behaviors Are Influencing Targeting Tactics
Online actions such as a person’s search history or the brands they like on social media platforms fall short in telling the full story of genuine consumer behavior. Offline behaviors, however, prove to be more indicative of a consumer’s likes, dislikes, and hobbies. During a time when people go fewer places, where they go tells us even more about who they are.
Latest Posts
7 Cannabis Data Analytics Firms
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
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
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.
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
Why TV Remains the Heartbeat of Local Connection