News and Analysis
Thanx Expands Access to Enterprise-Grade Loyalty Programs
Bespoke loyalty programs used to be reserved for the largest national brands. Restaurant chains like Pizza Hut, Chili’s, and Starbucks generated massive success as some of the first players in the industry to let customers earn and redeem rewards from their mobile phones. Now, the loyalty, CRM, and guest engagement platform Thanx is looking to bring those same high-end features to the broader business market.
Commentary
How to Solve the Franchise PPC Cannibalization Problem
Working with dozens of franchise brands, it’s been interesting to see how digital teams have structured their national pay-per-click (PPC) programs. Actually, maybe “interesting” isn’t the right word. It’s more so concerning. Many are so narrowly focused only on their national campaigns, they’re aloof when it comes to the local campaigns their franchisees are running. If corporate marketing teams are running digital campaigns on behalf of local franchises, they’re likely not set up and optimized in such a way where they’re being given enough TLC to drive meaningful results at the local level. While some brands get it right, many others have failed miserably.
The ideal scenario is executing local store PPC correctly alongside and in cooperation with national programs and gleaning insights from the data on one program to benefit the other in a symbiotic fashion.
App-ads.txt is an Anti-Fraud Tool, but for Publishers, it’s Really About Revenue
The IAB hasn’t mandated the adoption of app-ads.txt. In other words, it’s still the Wild West out there when it comes to fraud. But even the publishers that have done the right thing by adopting app-ads.txt have gotten the wrong message about the tool because it’s been presented entirely as a compliance matter. As a result, many mobile publishers treat app-ads.txt as a perfunctory anti-fraud measure that they can “set and forget.”
How Restaurants Can Capture More Customer Demand With Email
Email is often the primary channel for restaurants to stay in touch with customers and let them know about changes. When email is done right, there are many small ways restaurants can use it to personalize messaging, drive more engagement, and make their lives easier with scalable best practices.
Latest Posts
SMBs Warm Up to New Tech But Are Skeptical of Impersonal Interactions
A freshly released report from SMB software firm Broadly uses data from a survey of 300 SMB leaders to paint a picture of the American SMB in 2019: gradually embracing mobile-first communication, skeptical of innovation that undercuts human connection, and ambivalent toward large digital marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy.
Why Marketers Still Struggle With One-to-One Personalization
Personalization has long been touted as the future-proof way for businesses to connect with and retain customers. With Gartner predicting enterprises will win or lose due to customer experience in 2019 and beyond, offering customers meaningful, personalized experiences takes on even greater importance.
To uncover the truth about how personalization efforts are affecting the bottom line of the Global 2000 and just how much one-to-one personalization is taking place, we conducted a survey with Forbes that asked 200 marketing leaders just that.
Visual Search Moves Beyond Experimentation and Into Prime Time
After years of experimentation and broad discussions about how visual search would someday take hold, it’s clear that the future has arrived. Visual search has moved into the mainstream, and companies like Pinterest, Instagram, and even Google are paving the way for consumers to engage more deeply with the products they find online.
As visual search moves into the mainstream, questions are intensifying over what impact the medium will have on SEO and traditional search metrics.
Good Data vs Bad: How to Decide What to Keep and What to Discard
Unfortunately, there’s no “silver bullet” for separating good data from bad. Instead, organizations should think of data quality as a habit, with “good” data clearly defined and concrete processes in place to harvest what’s valuable and discard what isn’t.
With that in mind, here are three steps to taking unfiltered data and deciding what to keep — and what to throw out — to achieve optimal data accuracy.
Who’s Winning the Reviews Race? How Do We Define Winning?
In their latest Street Fight conversation, Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm examine the state of the local reviews space and assess the reasons for Google’s dominance. “For me, the question of the future is whether Google’s behaviors will impact the remaining vertical sites over the next 10 years,” Mike writes.
To Understand the Tech Industry’s Responsibilities, We Must Think Differently About Humanity
These questions would be preludes to less abstract ones that will seem more familiar to the creatures of Silicon Valley. Is Facebook responsible if people use WhatsApp and Messenger to spread false news and incite genocide? Is that just the fault of (heinous) people being (heinous) people or should the platforms be held accountable? As for privacy and data collection, what rights do people have to safeguard their information from the communications platforms they use? What does data scraped from Google search or Amazon’s facial recognition technology have to do with our identities? Can data be human?
Google Integrates Food Delivery into Search, Maps, Assistant
More or less following the model of Reserve with Google, which has seamlessly integrated the process of reserving a table at a nearby restaurant into SERPs, Google is now integrating food delivery into search, Maps, and Assistant, keeping consumers on Google properties for the entire journey as they make transactions via third-party couriers.
LBMA Vidcast: Macy’s & Pinterest; PlaceIQ, PMG, and Old Navy
On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Trial Run Media’s ABIE, Cheek-It’s scavenger hunt, JCDeacaux + Location Sciences, Macy’s launches OUT[FITS] with Pinterest, PlaceIQ partners with PMG on Old Navy, Admetrix + Locomizer. Research: S4M & LBMA contrast GDPR vs. CCPA
How to Survive the Coming Data Privacy Tsunami
Just as we have gotten used to the idea that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a fact of life and have made modifications in our data collection procedures, the Brazil General Data Protection Law (LGDP), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and waves of proposed new data privacy laws are swirling in the calm preceding a privacy tsunami heading our way. All these privacy regulations share a number of commonalities, and by addressing them now, you will be on high ground as the waves begin to pound.
As GDPR’s One-Year Anniversary Approaches, Where Are We Now?
One year in, it’s clear that the full impact of GDPR still hasn’t been felt. The regulation is structured in a way that puts less pressure on large companies than smaller businesses, and that’s something that regulators will have to continue sorting out. But the changes Europe’s law portends are undeniable: Privacy legislation is coming to the United States, and the data collection practices that made many Silicon Valley pioneers rich will never be quite so unbridled again.
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