Commentary
Brand Safety During Rapidly Changing Times
Our country has gone through several critical moments in recent history, navigating our way through a pandemic and undergoing a racial and cultural revolution. We’re seeing support from individuals and organizations large and small, but we’re also starting to see some tone-deaf content or misaligned messages as well. With everything going on, brand marketers need to be present and smart in regard to where their messages go and what they’re saying.
Personalized Marketing is a Must Right Now
Today, marketers have the luxury of being able to see consumers through the entire advertising funnel, enabling them to target consumers based on where they are in the buying process — from introduction of a product all the way to purchase intent. Brands have the ability, either in-house or via third-party vendors, to create and target ads that scale cross-device and cross-channel, reducing repetition, eliminating ad fatigue, and enhancing consumer experience throughout the funnel.
They can, and should, A/B test different messages, offers, and calls to action in real time to determine what resonates with each consumer down to the color of the button that generates more engagement. Marketers can do all of this across programmatic display, video, social, on YouTube and over-the-top (OTT) TV. So, why aren’t they?
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In the Wake of Spam Reports, Google Focuses on Brand and Small Business Engagement
Google’s calculated risk in creating a low bar for verification works out fine in a world where most business owners simply want to gain legitimate access to their own listings, and most businesses do operate within those ethical boundaries. But as we’ve seen elsewhere at this stage in the evolution of social networks, fraud and deceptive manipulation have become a kind of ghost in the machine, dominating darker sectors of the local marketplace and creating an atmosphere of distrust that may eventually prove more broadly contagious.
All of this is only possible when lots of activity is consolidated on a few platforms. Just as fake accounts attempting to engineer the 2016 election thrived in the vast and complex Facebook ecosystem, so too has Google’s dominance in local attracted its own horde of opportunists, drawn like moths to its flame. Indeed, fraud in local listings is just the latest in a long history of attempts, from link farms to keyword spam, to manipulate loopholes in Google’s regulations and algorithms.
Vendors Rush to Bring Privacy Verification Solutions to Market
The demand for data privacy is at an all-time high, just as consumer trust in the technology space is at an all-time low. Advertisers are grappling with wasted ad spend and uncertainty over ad verification. The market is in disarray, and technology vendors are hoping they have a solution to the problem.
Just this month, the offline consumer intelligence and measurement company Cuebiq launched a new verification solution for third-party data. The solution gives advertisers verifiable proof of compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
Consumers Welcome Some Automated Business Messaging, But Humans Must Tag Along to Help
More than half of consumers are frustrated by customer-service situations in which they can only interact with automated agents, and nearly one in five even reporting feeling angry in those situations. That’s per a new survey of U.S. consumers conducted by The Harris Poll and commissioned by call tracking and analytics firm Invoca.
Texting Allows Marketers to Reach Customers Where They Spend the Most Time
Seventy-six percent of consumers are already receiving texts from businesses, and a majority of consumers across all age groups would prefer that more businesses take up texting as a mode of communication, a new report from business text messaging platform ZipWhip indicates.
A whopping 83% of Gen-Z respondents and 82% of millennials said they “wish more businesses” would use texting. Even for older generations, that number made up a more than slight majority, including 76% of Gen-Xers and 64% of Baby Boomers.
The Retailpocalypse Doesn’t Have to Be Scary for Local Businesses
Headlines about retail closures suggest it’s Amazon’s world and we’re all just living in it, but there’s more to the story. For local businesses, in particular, there’s ample reason to be optimistic that the retail apocalypse doesn’t have to spell end times. In fact, exactly the opposite could be true. Let’s walk through a few of the reasons for optimism.
Alexa, Podcasts, and the Role of Voice in Today’s Marketing
The increasing popularity of smart speakers, digital assistants, and podcasts means we need to begin thinking differently about voice and marketing. That includes tailoring online content to users and how they engage with it, making voice functionality a part of the sales funnel, and creating podcasts or partnering with influencers to reach audiences in a new way. With the right approach, a creative brand could get a considerable head start in this new but quickly developing marketing landscape.
5 Consent Management Platforms for Brands and Publishers
For brands and publishers that work with multiple ad tech partners, the process of obtaining user consent for data processing is overwhelming. To simplify the workflow, publishers have started using consent management platforms (CMPs). Not only have CMPs been designed to help brands and publishers obtain and manage user consent, but they also help with monetizing users, even when users haven’t opted-in to sharing data.
CMPs were largely developed in response to the GDPR — most are built on the IAB’s transparency and consent framework — which means the systems themselves are still relatively young. Nonetheless, the popularity of this type of platform has led to a spring of new players entering the space. Here are five examples of CMPs on the market right now.
Google’s Fake Listings Problem Gets More Attention—and May Spur Regulation
Blumenthal to Mihm: It seems to me that Google could take the fake listings issue off the table by seriously investing in cleaning up the fake listing and fake review issue. I just don’t think that they think that way.
At a minimum, as the company that has the monopoly in the local space, Google faces the expectation and responsibility to provide a service that truly serves the public and businesses. And they seem to forget that.
Cannes Roundup: A Triad of Innovation is Capturing Advertisers’ Attention and Spend Right Now
This year, we saw the rise of three elements of technology-driven outcomes that, I’d suggest, represent a triad of innovation — and those elements are agility, speed, and the product-development capabilities to allow early-adopting brands to actually access emerging marketplaces (such as audio, as we saw this year). The first two terms are interconnected, and each fuels the drive for innovative products that big-name brands are beta-testing already.
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