News and Analysis
CPG Brands Rethink Advertising Strategy Amid Rising Food Costs, Inflation
While a decrease in food stamp benefits will clearly have the most profound impact on those families receiving benefits, it also marks a shift for supermarkets, retailers, and CPG brands, many of which are now looking to revamp their advertising strategies to account for a greater pool of shoppers searching for discounted items.
Criteo Acquires Brandcrush to Provide Additional Omnichannel Marketing Capabilities
In an effort to continue providing omnichannel monetization solutions for retailers across the globe, Criteo has acquired the Australian platform Brandcrush. Tapping into the combined capabilities of the companies, retail media buyers can now buy and sell inventory online and offline.
Geopath Data Shows Renewed Value of OOH
Geopath just released its 2023 Annual Forecast. For the first time, it includes transit stations, scheduled fleet media (i.e., sides of buses and other forms of transportation), and a new reach and frequency model derived from observed mobile location data. The return to normal makes OOH advertising as valuable as ever.
Commentary
Earnings Season Teases Retail’s Next Normal
Earnings results that rolled out from retail giants over the past week further demonstrate what our next normal will look like. Specifically, Walmart and Target both hit record numbers. This is partly a function of Covid-era circumstances, but it is also due to each retailer’s active e-commerce momentum.
The earnings validate consumer acclimation to digitally infused local shopping. What’s more, other retailers and down-market businesses will look to replicate this success. This can all therefore be viewed as a leading indicator for retail’s next normal.
Political Advertisers’ Impact on Brands
A recent report from eMarketer found that political ad spend will reach $6.89 billion in the 2019/2020 election period. This cycle’s spending is 63.3% higher than spend in the 2015/2016 season, showcasing a significant uptick in competition for brand marketers. That said, political advertisers are becoming savvier, expanding their breadth and scale into additional channels and further encroaching on brands’ digital bread and butter.
Here are a few ways political ad spend will impact brand marketers’ approach and how they can adjust their strategies so they don’t lose momentum in the coming months.
Covid-19 and Retail Survival: The Online-Offline Imperative
Covid-19 has upended the way consumers buy products. But the pandemic is hardly the only factor accelerating the shift from in-person to online purchasing. This trend has, in fact, intensified over the last decade. With more than 9,000 store closures last year in a strong economy, physical retailers for some time have been trying to figure out how they can thrive (and in some cases survive) in an increasingly digital marketplace.
It’s therefore imperative that retailers (of all sizes) embrace a hybrid business model, where online and offline assets are more integrated. Covid-19 has only made this more apparent.
Latest Posts
LBMA Vidcast: SpotHere Raises $50M
On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: SpotHere raises $50M, Israel’s Shufersal serves the visually impaired, Jibestream acquired by Inpixon, Amazon rolls its Treasure Truck, Comscore + PlaceIQ launch MovieLift, TomTom releases APIs for EV developers.
The Retail Fight Against Showrooming
If showrooming didn’t make brick-and-mortar retail obsolete, it’s definitely disrupting it for the better. The question is what brands need to do to survive and thrive through this transition. The answer lies in omnichannel marketing and sales, which is a many-pieced puzzle. Let’s explore what that means and why showrooming took off in the first place.
3 Reasons Facebook CPMs are Exploding
There are many issues that are causing the cost of advertising on Facebook to go up, but the benefits of Facebook advertising — reaching a logged-in audience with highly targeted and measurable campaigns — isn’t restricted to just Facebook. It’s time for marketers to diversify their ad spend and turn elsewhere to reach new audiences with a high return.
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.
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
What Google’s Search Agents Mean for MULO Businesses