News and Analysis

Thanx Loyalty 3.0

Thanx Expands Access to Enterprise-Grade Loyalty Programs

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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.

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Consumer Expectations Meet Marketing Reality in the Metaverse

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Meta shareholders have had it with the metaverse. When Mark Zuckerberg renewed his commitment to the project in an earnings call last week, Meta shares plunged 25%. For consumers, it’s a different story.

Google’s Latest Privacy Play Has Big Implications for the Open Web

Holiday E-Commerce: Google Focuses on Value

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With inflation high, markets struggling, and marketers widely doubling down on value, Google joined the trend, updating Shopping to emphasize deals and promotions.

Commentary

Why Consumers Want Coupons — And What Kind They Value Most

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Amid ongoing reports of consumer fatigue with coupons and declining coupon redemption rates, there is a ray of hope for retailers—mobile coupons. While consumers have a wide range of preferences in terms of their mobile engagement, CodeBroker’s mobile consumer research, based on input from more than 1,500 consumers around the country, offers one takeaway that applies to the masses: Mobile couponing works. There are a variety of reasons that this is the case.

The Changes Mobile Publishers Must Make during the Economic Recovery

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As we modify stay-at-home orders, the news is mixed for mobile publishers. Content consumption during quarantine rose as much as 80%. But advertising has suffered — 38% of advertisers halted all advertising, while 45% paused mid-campaign. It’s an ugly paradox — consumers value their mobile devices more than ever, but publishers are struggling to monetize that value.

Here’s how mobile publishers should prepare for the uncertain road ahead.

Why IP Targeting Has Never Been More Relevant

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A lot of money has been invested in slicing, dicing, and tying data to IP addresses to give rich profiles of online users at a very granular level, such as the sub-postal code, and in many cases ZIP-plus-4. IP targeting is certainly not down to a household level, as that defeats the privacy-sensitive nature of these solutions. Plus, IP addresses and internet infrastructure are not really made for that type of targeting. It’s not something that can be done.

But you can get much deeper profiles of behavior once you know that type of granularity around a user. If a business traveler is at a point of interest, for example at a hotel, he or she will have different interests than a residential online user. That involves building context around users―a very valuable evolution in IP targeting.

Latest Posts

Letter From the Editor: Retail Transformation Rules

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As we continue to evolve the definition of “local,” one key component of its market opportunity is offline brick-and-mortar shopping. After all, about 90% of all U.S. retail spending, to the tune of about $3.7 trillion, is completed offline in physical stores. And that’s usually in proximity to one’s home (thus, local).

This makes retail transformation a key focal point for Street Fight. And there’s a lot happening.

May Focus: Visualizing Local

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Street Fight is rolling into May with the theme, Visualizing Local: a look at how marketers are using visual content to boost visibility, presence, and conversions. This includes everything from images in search results and local listings to utilizing increasingly popular social media like Instagram Stories.

Foursquare’s Location-Based Loyalty Metrics Point to Best Practices for Casual Restaurants

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Brushing aside customer surveys and other imprecise measures of customer loyalty, location intelligence firm Foursquare released a location-based report this morning that evaluates best practices and practitioners in loyalty among casual restaurant chains. 

Most importantly for future considerations, the report suggests that brands can improve loyalty in all four of the areas that contributed to its index.

Voice Marketing Starts with Smart SEO

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How can enterprises better leverage voice search for brand marketing? To start, winning in voice search demands many of the same strategies as search engine optimization (SEO), as the goal in both cases is to get your content to rank position zero on search engine results pages (SERPs) by focusing on authority.

Report: Consumer Expectations for Brands Higher than Ever in Age of Convenience

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With the omnichannel age upon us, the impact of bad customer experiences is unprecedented. The main fear for businesses should no longer be a standoff between the worker behind the customer service desk and the angry customer who failed to get his discount; it should be the rant that hits social and is shared or liked a slew of times, dragging digital reputations through the mud.

Brand Building Beyond Reviews: Is the Local Marketing Ecosystem Ready?

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“I think it makes more sense for a small business to buy ‘brand building’ that includes some community events and link building than for that same business to buy SEO,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm. Find out what tech tools can build a local brand and why David disagrees partly with Mike’s suggestion.

The Power of Micro-Location Technology

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The location market has matured beyond push. The value of micro-location technology is now built on hyper-accurate analytics on where users go in the physical world, allowing advertisers to re-target them with a variety of omnichannel marketing efforts. Here are a few exciting use cases that highlight the power of hyper-accurate location-based marketing technology.

Walmart Tests Out the “Future of Retail” in Long Island Store

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There’s no time for the future of retail like the present. That is the motto at Walmart’s Intelligent Retail Lab, a live experiment in AI-driven shopping experiences that is now open to the public at a Walmart Neighborhood Market in Levittown, NY. 

Facebook Expects Record-Setting FTC Fine for Privacy Violations

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Five billion would be a record for FTC punishment of a tech company and would signal harsher scrutiny to come for an industry that has accrued unparalleled wealth and power with little regulatory oversight. Facebook’s fine comes after a saga of instances in which it failed to protect user data. Most damningly, the company vowed to shore up its data protection practices in 2011 and can now be accused of failing to uphold that promise.

How Emerging Technologies Allow Businesses to Merge Their Digital and Traditional Marketing

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New technologies (and new spins on old ones) are the modern company’s ally in merging digital and traditional marketing. The brands that find a sensible balance between the two are the brands that will outperform the competition. Let’s take a look at four major examples of innovation in this arena.