News and Analysis
Brands Learn to Scale Campaign Execution with Ad Automation
Jay Kulkarni, CEO and founder of Theorem, is one of a growing number of thought leaders encouraging the use of advertising optimization and automation as a way to modernize the traditional ad revenue model. Rather than relying on highly-manual processes and workflows, he believes brands should look at automation as a way to speed up order cycles and decrease errors.
How US State Privacy Laws Differ
California became the first state to pass a data privacy law years ago, but now several more have followed suit. Between US regulations and international ones, it can be difficult for companies to know just how to structure their data privacy protocols.
Why These 6 Retailers Are Expanding Into Service Businesses
If you’re a retailer with a successful omnichannel strategy and a robust e-commerce business, how do you continue to grow in 2023? The latest marketing play has retailers thinking beyond the store shelf and expanding into service-based businesses.
Commentary
How Brands Meet Evolving Customer Expectations with Creative Automation
What customers want from brands is transparency, product information, and available services. Tell audiences about new curbside pickup or what you’re doing to make deliveries safer. Think of how you are removing friction and easing customers’ worry and then speak about it, because not only are they listening, but they’re also paying attention to those who haven’t gotten it right.
Aside from finding the right story angle for customers, many marketing and in-house creative teams are struggling to produce enough new assets and push them quickly out the door, especially as they adjust to remote work. Here are some of the most common challenges brand-side creative teams face during these times and how creative automation can help overcome them.
Location Weekly: DoorDash Opening DashMart Stores
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Verizon deploying 2cm precision location tracking, DoorDash opening DashMart stores, and Google launching earthquake detection on Android devices. Rich Ventura of Sony Electronics joins as a guest.
Snapchat’s “Promote Local Place”: The Deeper Dive
Snapchat’s 200 million users can now use Snap Map to find businesses in addition to finding friends. These two activities can go hand in hand if friends are discovered nearby on the map when users are planning local adventures.
But what matters most for local is that Snap will now let businesses promote themselves in the map interface, adding a key option for local advertising. This will happen on a self-serve basis for both SMBs and multi-location brands.
Latest Posts
Heard on the Street, Episode 33: Building Network Effect for Location Intelligence
Responsible location intelligence involves practices like “stop data,” to measure users’ location dwell times, and the scale Foursquare achieves in its network of app publishers. Placed is one of the first location data players and a leader in attribution since 2011.
Now that the two companies have come together via acquisition, how does that position Foursquare for interstellar domination of the location intelligence market? It’s about greater capability and scale, say Foursquare’s Josh Cohen and David Shim, our guests on the latest episode of Heard on the Street.
Digital Advertisers Look to Connected Cars to Push Industry Forward
As the industry continues to evolve, Geopath’s Kym Frank predicts that two-way communication between cars and advertisers will become even more commonplace and OOH strategies that involve connected vehicle data will be the norm among major brand advertisers.
“The car itself can communicate with digital displays to trigger optimal creative, and the billboard can communicate with the dash to trigger in-app ads,” Frank says. “We are at the very beginning of seeing what is possible and measuring those impacts.”
Airship Acquires Apptimize to Sharpen Mobile Marketing Experiences
Airship rebranded to emphasize its shift from push notifications to a broader suite of messaging tools. Apptimize will help its clients iterate across channels and solutions as they attempt to find the best way to reach customers flooded with marketing and other kinds of media.
Connected Vehicle Data Will Revolutionize Audio Industry
Automotive OEMs have bulk data plans with cellular carriers primarily for collecting vehicle diagnostic data (e.g. mileage, engine warnings, etc.). As a result, it is now possible to capture data from millions of vehicles. This presents an opportunity to capture exponentially larger audio data sample sizes, especially for AM/FM radio, which will fundamentally change audience measurement, ad attribution, and program insights. While data today is primarily audio listening, the introduction of autonomous vehicles will result in significant consumption of video that can be measured in a similar way to audio.
Report: Location Targeting Ecosystem Suffers from Inaccuracy
Location Sciences analyzed 500 million digital location-targeted impressions in the US and UK in the first half of 2019. It concluded that for every $100,000 spent on location targeting, $29,000 fuels targeting outside the desired geographic range, and $36,000 in targeting does not produce strong enough signals to ensure accuracy.
The Hidden Opportunity Cost of Google Plus: Review Volume
Blumenthal: I was able to look at reviews per month since 2015 for a large number of restaurant locations across the sites that are now common in the restaurant industry. Interestingly, Yelp’s and TripAdvisor’s review volume is roughly the same now as it was in January 2015, while you can see that Google’s review volume is now roughly 10x that of either of those two sites. And Google was receiving fewer reviews per location per month than either Yelp or TA in early 2015.
There is an interesting but not totally obvious point on the slide where Google’s review volume starts to take off and that is April 2016. For those of you who don’t track Google minutiae quite the way that I do, that was the month when Google finally separated reviews from Google Plus and no longer required a Plus profile to leave a review.
6 Automotive Data Services Platforms
In order for consumer-facing companies and outside technology firms to take complete advantage of the data that’s being generated by automakers, the data coming from today’s connected vehicles needs to be aggregated and normalized.
Automotive data services platforms are stepping in with technology designed to take connected vehicles to the next level. By ingesting and cleansing data from connected cars, these platforms are helping minimize the development work that’s needed to launch a wide variety of third-party apps and services.
Here are six companies that are innovating in the space.
LBMA Vidcast: InMarket Acquires ThinkNear, Google Assistant Upgrade
On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: InMarket acquires Thinknear, Google Assistant lets you send reminders to others, Kraken Rum’s dining experience in London, Wirecard launches app in North America, Nike buys Celect for data science, Infiniti teams up with JCDecaux in Russia.
Back-to-School Retailing Is Now All About Using Mobile Data to Help Your Customers
Back to School (BTS) is a $53 billion shopping season that’s entering its final stage as parents and college students take care of school supplies and clothing needs before Labor Day. And as we close out this decade and look to the 2020s, the combination of mobile technology, hyperlocal commerce, and consumer expectations make this a fascinating juncture in BTS history.
Fortunately, these complex market scenarios represent more of a golden opportunity than a paradox due to the promise of mobile. Here are two reasons why national and local brands should leverage data to bridge the online-offline gap and improve their BTS sales.
Waymo Releases Data Set to Catalyze Autonomous Driving Research
Why should local search specialists care about autonomous vehicles? The same way mobile, with its natural on-the-go use cases, has become the hub of “near me” searches that lead consumers into local businesses, cars will become the next mobile device, catalyzing the next wave of “near me” queries. Self-driving cars are not tangential to the future of local; they are central to it.
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Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem