News and Analysis
Clean Room Consortium Aims to Clarify How Advertisers Can Use the Technology
Adam Gelles, CEO of The B2B Marketing Company, and Richard Sobel, CEO of Mercato Solutions, founded the Clean Room Consortium as a sort of trade organization to help all stakeholders understand and best capitalize on the technology. We touched base on how advertisers and publishers are already using clean rooms and what the media community needs to know.
Commentary
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.
A Call for Brand Safety: Using OOH to take Ownership of Advertising Environment
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.
Latest Posts
August Focus: Local’s Next Battleground is Your Car
Why are connected cars important to Street Fight (and to you)? As we continue to evolve the definition of “local,” one key component of its market opportunity is offline brick-and-mortar shopping. After all, about 90% of all U.S. retail spending, to the tune of about $3.7 trillion, is completed offline in physical stores. That is usually in proximity to one’s home (thus, local).
Could an increasingly digital and connected car influence those purchases when consumers are out and about? This is one extension of the local search that consumers used to do at home but now do on their mobile devices while on the move. The car could become a third point of connection and influence.
Low-Hanging Technical SEO Fruit for Local Ranking
Local SEO is powerful. If you run an ice cream shop out of Wichita, Kansas, then you’d probably want to show up on Google when a person there searches for ice cream. Search engines have become crucial for existing and potential customers to connect with businesses.
Some business owners unintentionally set up obstacles to appearing on local search by improper site structure. Here are some low-hanging fruits to help your business appear for local searches.
Heard on the Street, Episode 31: CDPs and Israeli Innovation
As data science continues to collide with digital marketing, customer behavior metrics are reaching new levels of actionable insight. But counteracting that advantage is the growing fragmentation of devices and platforms used in the path to purchase, making it harder to get a single view of the customer.
This is the world of customer data platforms (CDPs), and it is where Optimove hangs its hat. Founder & CEO Pini Yakuel explains to us on the latest episode of Heard on the Street how the company helps brands and multi-location retailers get the insights they need to better serve their customers.
Phone-as-a-Service?
It’s becoming clear that we’re headed toward a new vision for our devices: the Phone as a Service (PaaS). Yes, sounds crazy, but look at the parallels between your phone and how/why other “X”s have become services:
X-as-a-service (XaaS) is delivery of X directly via the internet, eliminating the need to use and manage multiple and independent solutions on locally hosted devices, right? So, PaaS is the delivery of personalized media via the phone, eliminating the need to use and manage multiple and independent, locally hosted apps. We’re already seeing that happen.
6 Companies Reimagining Last-Mile Delivery
There’s a renewed push in Silicon Valley to tackle last-mile delivery. The use of autonomous vehicles, drones, and artificial intelligence is what more and more vendors are pushing for. Last-mile delivery is the most expensive part of shipping, and increasing fees mean prices are only going higher. The company that can get goods from a transportation hub to the customer’s doorstep in the shortest amount of time will win the retail game, and technology firms are hoping that their innovative solutions will be the answer that retailers are looking for.
Here are six examples of companies that are working to innovate in the last-mile delivery space.
Consulting Firms and Agencies Are the Perfect Complement for Data-as-a-Service
External data is incredibly hard to use and make sense of. After all, it is just data. It is usually delivered via a big CSV dump or API call. Most data companies just hand off the data to their customers and say “good luck.” In fact, a decent amount of purchased data just sits on the shelf and is never used.
This is where the forward-thinking consulting firms and agencies come in. They have a massive opportunity to help organizations make use of external data.
Offline Retailers See Huge Boost From Prime Day’s Online Sales
Amazon wasn’t the only retailer to see high purchase intent during its two-day event. Competing retailers saw similar successes piggybacking on Amazon’s newest shopping holiday with their own discounts and limited-time deals. This year’s Prime Day event drove a 14% spike in U.S. traffic on its first day, compared to baseline traffic from the month of June.
According to data collected by Constructor.io, an AI-first SaaS provider for ecommerce sites, among the non-Amazon companies having sales during Prime Day, search volume increased an average of more than 500%.
Half of Organizations Send the Wrong Marketing Messages to Customers
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
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.
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