News and Analysis
Grocers Grapple with Reaching Middle-Market Shoppers
Of all the categories of retail shoppers, one stands out as being particularly difficult to reach — the middle-market shopper. Neither price sensitive nor premium, middle-market shoppers are unpersuaded by the availability of cheaper or more sustainable options. To engage this elusive group, one-to-one marketing is the only reliable option.
Quotient Offers Advertisers Scale with Retail Ad Network
More players are entering the retail media space each month, making it increasingly difficult for brands to measure retail media campaigns across multiple networks in a holistic way. But executives at the digital promotions firm Quotient believe they’ve found a solution. Just this morning, Quotient launched its own retail ad network.
Commentary
The Problems with a Band-Aid Approach to Data Governance and Compliance
As more privacy laws pop up, blanket policies and compliance band aids could result in brands cutting away 20% to 40% of the data they would have previously collected. A big portion of that data is likely usable in different scenarios, but a failure to operate at the edge means that brands are cutting away portions to be on the safe side.
Rather than jettison huge chunks of data because it may not be compliant, the industry needs to adopt granular data governance controls that provide a view into the circumstances of every piece of data.
How Advertisers Can Turn the Facebook Boycott into a Transformative Moment
It would be helpful if about 20 of the large brands boycotting Facebook put their money where their mouth is and invested in the establishment of a data and publisher sharing network.
The next step would be identifying the media publisher outlets as partners. The co-op would need to negotiate a performance-based publisher relationship, which would effectively increase content monetization for publishers’ content channels.
How Email Marketing Will Evolve in the Next 5 Years
With a tool that enables us to reach millions of potential customers with the click of a button, it’s tempting to send out mass promotional emails that reach the maximum number of people possible, but besides having been done to death, that means missing out on huge opportunities. Over the years, email marketing has steadily been moving away from the newsletter and promotional blast to behaviorally driven, event-triggered, one-to-one messaging. In one word: personalization.
Latest Posts
Publishers (And Everyone Else), Beware Amazon
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
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
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
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
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
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?
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
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.
What’s a Cloud Kitchen? Amazon’s Next Move to Revolutionize a Major Shopping Sector
Jeff Bezos likes to say, “Your margin is my opportunity.” Like with Whole Foods and grocery, Amazon moves into new verticals and applies its logistics-first approach to carve out margins, then undercut competitors. It is even getting into shipping, in a move to own its delivery infrastructure.
The next local conquest could be restaurants. For Amazon, it’s not just about serving food, but doing so in a way that aligns with its forte: delivering things to your home. The biggest clues and synergies lie in its established delivery and logistics playbook as well as its recent $575 million investment in Deliveroo.
Enter the cloud kitchen.
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
Authentic Storytelling: Real-Life Scenarios Showcase Brand Values and Build Trust