News and Analysis
The New Face of Local Businesses: A Conversation with Yelp
In the local media and commerce sectors, we continue to see rapid product evolution as well as maturation in the companies that deliver those products. But as that unfolds, we’re also tracking another evolution: that of local businesses themselves. How are they advancing in terms of marketing and operational software adoption?
Brands Test Both Luxury and Accessible Metaverse Marketing Campaigns
Luxury fashion brands like Gucci and sports retailers like Nike are selling digital versions of popular real-world products for thousands of dollars in the metaverse, and the fast-fashion retailer Forever 21 is selling products in Roblox that cost less than $1 each. The high/low approach is just one of many being tested by big name brands.
Commentary
The Future Isn’t First-Party or Third-Party Data. It’s Earned Data.
Google’s recent announcement of its intention to phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome browser over the next two years, in addition to sparking plenty of speculation and doomsday prophecies, has led to much discourse over what a future driven by first-party data, as opposed to third-party data, might look like for marketers.
But there’s a lesser-known type of data that’s being left out of these conversations—one that sits in between first- and third-party data and delivers both accuracy and scale. It’s called earned data, and it warrants the attention of every marketer who’s planning their transition to a cookieless world right now.
Location Weekly: PayPal Facilitates Contactless Payments
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association hosts Vanjo Wandscher, Group CEO, ROQQIO Commerce Solutions.
The team also covers Westfield’s Mall of the Netherlands using LEDs and AR to drive social distancing, MapinHood ensuring social distancing on sidewalks, and PayPal facilitating QR code contactless payment.
The Impact of Covid-19 on Local Search for Healthcare
On March 20, the Google My Business team announced they would disable reviews and Q&A (since restored) in order to conserve human and machine bandwidth for critical updates. New listing creation and verification was also temporarily disabled. Google made these moves, in large part, in order to ensure that listings in critical categories, especially healthcare, would remain up to date.
The Google My Business product team also rushed to create new features in response to the crisis, such as a “temporarily closed” flag in the GMB dashboard and prominent attributes showcasing the availability of services like pickup and delivery. Healthcare was a primary focus in this phase of new feature development, which is still ongoing.
Latest Posts
Years After YouTube-Driven Brand Safety Crisis, Consumer Concerns Remain
A whopping 60% of consumers surveyed by mobile ad tech firm AdColony say they still see content on Facebook that is damaging to brands, and 49% say seeing appropriate advertisements in proximity to harmful content negatively affects their perception of proper advertisers. That’s the most provocative finding from a survey that indicates the brand safety issue is far from resolved in the digital advertising ecosystem.
The Blind Spot in Facebook’s Vision of Privacy
Insofar as Facebook’s pivot to privacy fails to reward its users for the data that has made it one of the world’s most powerful and profitable companies, I see it as a modest change that is more reactive than proactive, more inevitable than forward-thinking. It is likely that Facebook is only beginning to lay out its moves on privacy, and more ambitious changes may lie ahead. But for now, when it comes to the most pressing, fundamental ethical challenges that are inciting political fervor and increasing the likelihood that serious regulation of Big Tech is on the way, Zuckerberg is dragging his feet. With visionaries like Lanier and Zuboff raising public awareness about Facebook’s business model, the truth may just catch up with him.
Things Not Strings: Google’s New Hotel Profiles Exemplify Its Approach to Entities
Google’s Knowledge Graph ambitions are expanding to include obviating heavy reliance on secondary sources like Wikipedia and being able instead to classify and cross-reference information as a native, self-sustaining activity on web pages themselves. That’s what makes a recent patent filing different from the evidence of the Knowledge Graph we’ve already seen in the wild.
While this more ambitious way of surfacing information about entities is not yet standard, in researching Google’s new interface for hotels, I think I’m seeing evidence of a real-world example.
3 Revenue Growth Opportunities for SMB Marketing and Ad Agencies
While SMB digital marketing spend has seen a steady rise, SMBs are being more conservative about the agencies and vendors with which they partner. In the transparency era, consolidating spend with a select group of trusted agency partners that offer multiple core services is now the norm.
For agencies that cater to SMB brands, these trends have created opportunities and challenges. There is money to be had, but only organizations that differentiate themselves from the competition and can deliver clear ROI will benefit. So how can SMB agencies show their value to brands and ensure revenue growth? There are three opportunity areas, in particular, that can help.
Measuring the Impact of McDonald’s Push Into Automation, Personalization
With the right personalization and automation technology in place, McDonald’s is said to have plans to learn about customers through their ordering behaviors. More specifically, McDonald’s is planning to use Dynamic Yield’s technology to create a drive-thru menu that can be tailored based on factors like weather, restaurant traffic, and trending menu items. For example, when the temperature tops 100 degrees, milkshakes and ice cream sundaes might move into a prominent spot on the drive-thru menu board. When it starts raining outside, coffee and hot chocolate might take top billing.
Heard on the Street, Episode 23: Google, AI, 5G and Marketing Champagne
What do Google’s AI-fueled search results, 5G, and marketing champagne all have in common? They’re the central topics of a roundtable discussion on the latest episode of Street Fight’s podcast, Heard on the Street.
As we do quarterly, this is a bonus episode that puts aside our typical interview format and instead invites the leading thinkers from the Street Fight newsroom and executive ranks to discuss news and insights that are top of mind.
The High Stakes of Identity
Identification is the key to relevant, timely, and cohesive cross-channel marketing that increases sales and builds brand loyalty. Do it right, and you’ll achieve the kind of truly personalized marketing of which our predecessors could only dream. Here are the major tenets of a successful, privacy-aware strategy for storing data on consumers in a multichannel landscape.
Publishers Need to Pivot to First-Party Data
Rather than developing entirely new inventory strategies, which is a heavy lift, publishers can look to what they already have—rich behavioral, subscriber, and social data, most of it seriously under-leveraged. When used properly, first-party data can help publishers drive revenue in two ways—directly and indirectly. It can help them to stop working harder and start working smarter.
6 Customer Data Platforms for Brands
Customer data platforms dominated the conversation at the MarTech Conference in California earlier this month, as marketers shared how they’ve been able to pull data from multiple sources, combine that data into single customer profiles, and then make that data available to other marketing systems.
With so much hype surrounding customer data platforms right now, we decided to dig into the market and learn about some of the hottest players in the space. Here’s what we found.
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Streets Ahead: Perplexity’s Ranking Logic, Instagram Metrics