News and Analysis
Why and How Retailers Are Dropping Very Generous Return Policies
COVID ushered in a period of free and limitless returns as retailers scrambled to keep shoppers at a time when stores were closed. But the worst days of COVID are in the rearview mirror, and the 2023 macroeconomic environment provides no succor for overly generous policies.
OpenFortune Cuts Through Digital Clutter with a Physical Media Format
The biggest action in brand marketing is happening online in 2023, but as digital channels proliferate, one agency is moving in the opposite direction. OpenFortune, a New York-based agency, is leveraging fortune cookies to bring branded content to restaurant customers across the U.S.
Is Super Bowl Advertising Still Worth the Investment for National Brands?
Is advertising during the Super Bowl still worth the seven-figure investment? That’s the question national brands and agencies are asking, just weeks away from the biggest advertising event of the year.
Commentary
Location Weekly: Coca-Cola Goes Contactless, Amazon’s Smart Shopping Cart
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Coca-Cola going contactless with its Freestyle machines, Amazon putting Go in a shopping cart, Walgreens opening doctors’ offices in its stores, and Shake Shack launching summer camp in a box.
A Call for Brand Safety: Using OOH to take Ownership of Advertising Environment
Brands today are spending valuable time assessing and understanding the environments in which they exist and the communities they impact. I expect that more brands will turn to OOH as we move closer to the election; it is a one-of-a-kind medium that provides a safe platform to share messaging while fostering conversations and shaping a local environment.
Most importantly, the tangible IRL impact of OOH provides a level of authenticity that amplifies voice and connects with people as they safely enjoy some much-needed time outside of their homes.
Hyperlocal Device Targeting Should Be Part of Your Advertising Strategy
True hyperlocal advertising revolves around mobile location data. The intersection among time, place, device, and creative is the sweet spot that we’re aiming for here. By harnessing mobile location data, digital marketers can employ smarter audience targeting, deliver more timely and relevant ad messaging, generate more foot traffic, and measure the offline results of online marketing efforts.
If you’re looking to add location-based advertising to your digital marketing mix, here are some effective tactics that can help you boost in-store visits.
Latest Posts
12 Years After the iPhone, Marketers Need to Lean Into Digital Wellness
Once upon a time, “getting a Starbucks coupon as you walk by a Starbucks” was the Holy Grail example of the potential power of mobile marketing. With the iPhone turning 12 years old this week, it’s a great time to observe how drastically more sophisticated digital relationships between consumers and brands have gotten thanks to the supercomputers in our pockets.
Mobile is now about building a customer journey and taking patrons to the next level rather than a single, location-based transaction. You hear it a lot: the customer journey reigns supreme, but there’s a good reason for “customer journey” becoming like the Greek chorus in marketing. Consumers are inundated with messages from brands, so marketers need to be judicious about how, when, where, and why they reach out to customers.
Chatmeter Scores New Funding Amid Hiring Spree
Local brand management platform Chatmeter announced a new investment by Providence Strategic Growth aimed at helping the company increase its ambitions further after hiring 25 employees over the course of six months. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
What’s a Cloud Kitchen? Amazon’s Next Move to Revolutionize a Major Shopping Sector
Jeff Bezos likes to say, “Your margin is my opportunity.” Like with Whole Foods and grocery, Amazon moves into new verticals and applies its logistics-first approach to carve out margins, then undercut competitors. It is even getting into shipping, in a move to own its delivery infrastructure.
The next local conquest could be restaurants. For Amazon, it’s not just about serving food, but doing so in a way that aligns with its forte: delivering things to your home. The biggest clues and synergies lie in its established delivery and logistics playbook as well as its recent $575 million investment in Deliveroo.
Enter the cloud kitchen.
Embracing Hyperlocal Creative at Scale
The challenge of authentic content is doing it at scale, in a way that is brand safe, across all markets. While creating custom content could seem like a feasible task for international companies with endless resources at their fingertips, even legacy brands all too often struggle with personalized, custom, local content at scale. It’s equally as challenging for local businesses like franchises, small agencies, and Mom-and-Pop shops who are charged with many business tasks outside of content creation. One of the pivotal concerns in digital marketing as it applies to content and content creation is having an efficient process to scale content production.
So, how can franchises, local businesses, and brands scale their creative marketing content to better reach local markets?
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.”
LBMA Vidcast: Walmart and WhatsApp, Gucci Tries Out AR
On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Walmart Mexico accepts WhatsApp orders, Nex raises £2M for lunch discovery, Gucci lets try on shoes in AR, 7Eleven delivers to beaches & parks, Reveal Mobile launches foot traffic attribution, Trax acquires Shopkick.
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.
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Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem