Commentary
Location Weekly, Featuring Co-Founders of Geofencing Platform Bluedot
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Fit:Match teaming with Brookfield for virtual fitting rooms in malls; Walmart, Cadillac, Fairview, and others transforming parking lots into virtual cinemas; and Uber buying Postmates for $2.65B. The team also hosts Emil Davityan and Filip Eldic, co-founders of Bluedot.
Apple and Snap Signal Local AR Commerce Ambitions
Recent announcements from Snap and Apple at their respective developer conferences point to future connections between AR and local commerce.
Snap’s Local Lenses will let developers create geo-anchored persistent content that Snap users can discover through the camera interface. This will also include the ability for users to leave persistent AR graphics for friends to discover. The use case that Snap has promoted is more about fun and whimsy, including “painting” the world with digital and expressive graffiti. But the development could also include local storefront information.
Moving on to Apple, it similarly continues to show its AR aspirations. The latest is GeoAnchors for ARkit, announced at WWDC. These evoke AR’s location-based potential by letting users plant and discover spatially anchored graphics that are persistent across sessions and users.
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.
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Report: DTC Brands Outperform Traditional Retail, Win Over Gen-Z
As the millennial generation settles down and moves into its 30s, retailers are looking at a new group of consumers as the most coveted demographic. Generation Z—born between 1994 and 2002—is forming its own identity and seeking out different shopping experiences than its older counterparts.
A new report, released by the location intelligence platform Ubimo, finds that Generation Z shows a surprising preference for physical stores, although members of this group aren’t interested in shopping so much as experiencing new products in-store.
How Long Will Google’s “Calculative PR” Playbook Work in Local Search?
Mihm: The engineering mindset that millions of spammy listings in a corpus of hundreds of millions of legitimate listings worldwide, or a (hundred million?) spam reviews in a corpus of billions of legitimate reviews worldwide, are simply “edge cases” that are beneath Google to prioritize reflects a profound lack of empathy for how their technology impacts fellow human beings — both consumers and especially small business owners and their employees.
Blumenthal: Absolutely agree. And a related problem is that they see customer service in the same context: as an engineering/cost-benefit problem to solve, not as a way to improve their product. As such they see the last 5, 10 or 15% errors in their big data solutions as just a cost of doing business that they have no responsibility to solve.
How Targeting Fuels Audience Activation and Satisfaction
Consumers benefit from targeting. When there are clear rules and guardrails in place for tracking and targeting, shoppers enjoy a more relevant online experience and a panoply of ad-funded digital services.
Traditional ads still have a place in the marketing mix, of course. But the future of marketing is digital. Online ad spend is expected to surpass traditional ad spend (likely for good) this year. How is it that targeting, while respecting privacy, makes the consumer internet better?
Heard on the Street, Episode 29: Push Notifications and Tech History, with Airship’s Mike Stone
Airship has been innovating around push notifications for more than a decade, a lifetime in internet years. Airship SVP of Marketing Mike Stone, the latest guest on Street Fight’s Heard on the Street podcast, broke down the company’s approach to the mobile marketing business.
“There are two dimensions. One is the proliferation of devices and the channels that are attached to them, but there’s also that much more difficult thing of what consumers are willing to do,” said Stone. “The devices are one thing, but it’s also, once they’re there, where’s that line of creepy versus helpful.”
Cutting-Edge Cannabis Trends in an Industry That Just Keeps Growing
I make it a priority to stay on top of the ever-changing trends of the cannabis industry. A plant that is no longer being grown roadside and smoked out of fruit bongs (unless you’re into that), the 2019 version of cannabis can seem a little intimidating to the average (Mary) Jane. Below are the top trends that I’ve noticed are gaining popularity with cannabis users.
Transparency and Brand Purpose Dominated Cannes
The big topic of the week was industry change, driven largely by transparency. Agencies are evaluating opportunities and challenges to their business model as buyers demand more oversight of media, fees, and attribution. Increasing interest in ad tech in-housing has also stoked soul-searching.
Every brand also talked about reflecting an authentic, real world in its marketing—from the people in front of and behind the cameras, to creative and targeting strategies. The campaigns that seemed the most likely to succeed were all “purpose-centric,” with the brand rallying around a specific and common cause.
Fresh Chalk Has a New Take on Local Reviews
Despite digital change, recommendations from friends remain one of the most credible forms of marketing. Now, a new startup called Fresh Chalk is aiming to capitalize on that, giving consumers a way to find local professionals with help from their friends.
Like Yelp, Facebook, Google, and other local business directories, Fresh Chalk is aiming to help people source recommendations from reliable, qualified businesses in their own communities. But unlike most other competitors in the market, Fresh Chalk is keeping a tight focus on personal connections.
This Largely Brick-and-Mortar Industry Is Resisting Digital Disruption
Despite Amazon’s high-profile acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, grocery is the bastion of brick-and-mortar shopping proving unusually resistant to a takeover by digital channels. At least, that is the vision of consumers, only 15% of whom say they are excited about the technical “revolution” in grocery, according to a new report on the future of retail by Walker Sands.
Studying the Relationship Between Phone Price and Income
The results of our study show that the more expensive your phone is, the more likely you are to come from a higher income bracket. Our model predicts that, for every dollar that the average price for a cell phone in a given zip code increases, the median income for that zip code will also increase by $122.70 — in other words, by a fairly significant amount.
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