News and Analysis

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

Share this:

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

social media tiktok

Lowe’s Joins Brand Marketers Embracing TikTok’s Influence

Share this:

TikTok’s influence has been felt throughout 2022, but it’s about to get even harder to ignore this holiday season. 

Vibenomics Survey: Retail Shoppers Prioritizing Price Above All Else

Share this:

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

A Call for Brand Safety: Using OOH to take Ownership of Advertising Environment

Share this:

Brands today are spending valuable time assessing and understanding the environments in which they exist and the communities they impact. I expect that more brands will turn to OOH as we move closer to the election; it is a one-of-a-kind medium that provides a safe platform to share messaging while fostering conversations and shaping a local environment. 

Most importantly, the tangible IRL impact of OOH provides a level of authenticity that amplifies voice and connects with people as they safely enjoy some much-needed time outside of their homes. 

Contact Center Should Be the Marketing Engine

Hyperlocal Device Targeting Should Be Part of Your Advertising Strategy

Share this:

True hyperlocal advertising revolves around mobile location data. The intersection among time, place, device, and creative is the sweet spot that we’re aiming for here. By harnessing mobile location data, digital marketers can employ smarter audience targeting, deliver more timely and relevant ad messaging, generate more foot traffic, and measure the offline results of online marketing efforts. 

If you’re looking to add location-based advertising to your digital marketing mix, here are some effective tactics that can help you boost in-store visits.

Can a Pandemic Inflect Local Commerce Tech? Part II

Share this:

What about the tech adoption accelerants happening on the supply side? Tech giants who provide marketing and operational tools for local businesses have been in hyperdrive over the past few months to roll out new Covid-era features.

Here are three areas where we’re seeing the most activity … and where we could correspondingly see the most local business evolution.

Latest Posts

Retailers Are Using AI for Onboarding, Associate Retention

Share this:

The retail landscape is going through an evolution, with mom-and-pop stores on Main Street being replaced by e-commerce outlets that rely on sophisticated algorithms to manage virtually every aspect of business operations.

While most headlines about the transformation of retail focus on the consumer-side of the equation, there’s even more change going on behind the scenes. Competition between e-commerce and brick-and-mortar is forcing innovation in the way retailers approach the challenges that come with onboarding and retaining in-store associates.

Publishers (And Everyone Else), Beware Amazon

Share this:

Amazon’s success comes at a cost for publishers. Its growth means that retail and CPG brands are shifting digital spend away from publishers, siphoning off a key source of revenue. How can publishers compete? Their survival may come down to better ways of monetizing existing channels like email, as well as more effective use of their greatest asset: first-party data.

The hope for publishers lies in email and the power of the email address. With email, publishers have a logged-in channel that’s virtually fraud-free. Email represents a direct relationship with the consumer and one that is detached from platform intermediaries that have unfairly claimed revenue and attribution from the rightful influencer: the publisher. And contrary to popular belief, email is still a channel where people spend over five hours a day. What’s more, email is impervious to subtle shifts of an algorithm that force a publisher to buy the right to reach people, as opposed to owning the relationship with those who have requested a publisher’s content in the first place. 

Teaching An Old Brand New Tricks

Share this:

An agile brand strategy allows organizations to update traditional brand messages in the moment as events happen, while still remaining true to their core values and identity. Agile branding is not about changing things all the time; it’s about responding and iterating in order to stay relevant.

Technology is the driving force behind agile branding. Modern consumers expect more from their favorite brands, and through a variety of tech platforms, they interact with them on a daily basis. Connecting to consumers through digital and largely interactive channels (like social media) gives brands access to a valuable supply of consumer data. In this “always-on” culture, knowing what consumer audiences are saying, thinking, and feeling about your brand in real time is at the core of an agile brand. 

Retailers Leverage Prime Day to Boost Offline Sales

Share this:

Unlike other shopping “holidays,” like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Amazon Prime Day is specific to a single retailer. But as the event grows, other retailers—both online and offline—are finding ways to leverage the anticipation that consumers are feeling.

Last year, 63% of Prime Day shoppers said they visited competing websites to compare prices. This is a major opportunity for online retailers to capitalize on the spike in traffic and provide consumers with personalized and targeted offerings and exclusive deals.

This Company is Forging a New Path for Digital Advertising with a Focus on Consumer Consent

Share this:

Brave is an example of how privacy-forward digital advertising business models that foreground consumer content can work for all parties. Users are not tracked all over the Web and choose how many ads they would like to see; they will also soon get rewards. In return, advertisers can be sure that the people seeing their advertisements are actually interested in looking at ads, and they can also boost loyalty or reach new customers by offering rewards for ad viewing.

Perhaps most importantly, with GDPR in place for more than a year and CCPA and other state privacy laws in the works, advertisers and platforms are less likely to get sued.

Why Texting Is Indispensable for Mobile Marketing Today

Share this:

Historically, because of cost and resource restrictions, text messaging was a marketing tool reserved for Fortune 500 companies. But thanks to new advancements in digital marketing platforms, it’s now available to businesses of any size, with any budget and in any industry. Whether you’re a non-profit group, government entity, corporation or startup, your organization can and will likely benefit from this need-to-have approach to engagement. 

To establish meaningful relationships with customers and ultimately build brand loyalty, consider these mobile messaging strategies as one part of your company’s overall digital marketing campaign.

LBMA Vidcast: Sam’s Club and Instacart Partner on Alcohol Delivery

Share this:

On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Brands form “Voice Coalition”, CherryPicks navigation + translation app, Paytronix + FriendShip loyalty, Signify’s new LiFi, Coca-Cola Italy drives recycling, Sam’s Club + Instacart for alcohol delivery.  Special – new white paper from Digital Element.

Is Amazon Killing the Holiday Shopping Season?

Share this:

Long lines of shoppers snaking around retail stores used to be commonplace on the morning after Thanksgiving. So was the tradition of picking up a print newspaper for an early look at the Black Friday ads. But with retailers like Amazon, Nordstrom, Alibaba, and Flipkart creating their own shopping holidays, the frenzy around Black Friday and Cyber Monday has been tamped down. Is this a sign of the times or just a blip in retail’s evolution?

To find the answer, the mobile app marketing firm Liftoff and the mobile measurement company Adjust teamed up and took a deep dive into the consumer activity on shopping apps throughout the calendar year. In a new report, the firms found that with excuses to shop year round, traditional shopping holidays, like Black Friday and the New Year period, are waning in significance. These events are gradually becoming less vital for online and offline retailers, even if they remain important moments.

12 Years After the iPhone, Marketers Need to Lean Into Digital Wellness

Share this:

Once upon a time, “getting a Starbucks coupon as you walk by a Starbucks” was the Holy Grail example of the potential power of mobile marketing. With the iPhone turning 12 years old this week, it’s a great time to observe how drastically more sophisticated digital relationships between consumers and brands have gotten thanks to the supercomputers in our pockets.

Mobile is now about building a customer journey and taking patrons to the next level rather than a single, location-based transaction. You hear it a lot: the customer journey reigns supreme, but there’s a good reason for “customer journey” becoming like the Greek chorus in marketing. Consumers are inundated with messages from brands, so marketers need to be judicious about how, when, where, and why they reach out to customers.

Chatmeter Scores New Funding Amid Hiring Spree

Share this:

Local brand management platform Chatmeter announced a new investment by Providence Strategic Growth aimed at helping the company increase its ambitions further after hiring 25 employees over the course of six months. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.