News and Analysis
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.
What Every Marketing Team Needs to Thrive in 2022
The economic headwinds businesses face today make it even more important for marketing teams to work smarter in order to drive growth. Businesses should be stepping up their local marketing efforts and running more hyperlocal campaigns if they want to continue to grow through the second half of the year and the first half of 2023.
Commentary
Location Weekly: GroundTruth and Yext Partner, Facebook Unveils Shops
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association hosts Mike Peters, CMO, Optimizers, and Head of LBMA Sweden.
The team also covers GroundTruth and Yext announcing a new partnership, Reveal mobile releasing a free version of its Visit Local platform, and Facebook Shops launching in the U.S.
Location Data Companies Rise to the Challenge of Covid-19
The location data market has responded to many external pressures in recent years. Guided by new privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA as well as operating system updates by Apple and Android, the industry has put the consumer back at the center. The old days of capturing data and selling to ad tech firms without permission are over.
These shifts are good news for society. But they are also good news for the location industry, which has pivoted to thrive in this new world where squeezed supply impacts the quality of location data.
Now, Covid-19 has presented a new challenge, with movement data restricted to unprecedented levels. So, how are location data companies responding to the crisis?
Essential Business Foot Traffic: U.S. Grocery Store Trends
This article takes an up-close look at foot traffic to what may be the most critical of essential businesses: grocery stores.
Grocery stores are crucial during the quarantine and will remain so as areas of the retail economy reopen and as we enter into a recovery period. According to the National Grocers Association, grocers are especially adept at making and executing contingency plans in the event a disaster strikes. This involves coordination with myriad producers, distributors, and wholesalers throughout the supply chain. It is no small task keeping eggs, milk, butter, and bread in stock and on the shelves of your local supermarket.
Latest Posts
Report: Education of SMB Marketers a Glaring Hole in Vendor Approaches
The disconnect between how vendors think they are supporting and educating their clients, and how those clients actually feel they are being supported, can be alarming. BrandMuscle’s report found that local marketers are hungry for marketing knowledge, and yet 18% believe they get “little to no support” from the agencies or marketing teams with which they work. Twenty-eight percent say they get “check-the-box support,” which is still insufficient.
Letter From the Editor: Broadening “Local”
Street Fight’s charter for the past nine years has been to chronicle the happenings of, and pull strategic insights from, the world of location-based media and marketing. But this impactful area that we’ve all come to know as simply “local” continues to evolve and expand.
This sparks an ongoing question we ask ourselves: What is “local?” The answer to that question is different depending on whom you ask. To some, it might mean how restaurant ingredients are sourced. To those in the local advertising industry, it might mean “SMB,” and to others, it could mean how ads are targeted. The answer is that all of the above are correct.
April Focus: Automating Local
We’ve kicked off 2019 with themed content for January (Beyond the Screen), February (Word of Mouth), and March (Targeting Location). We now roll into April with Automating Local: a look at how AI is impacting local commerce and marketing. How is it empowering local marketers, and who’s doing what? How are sub-sectors like “retail-as-a-service” bringing AI into retail to transform shopping experiences and empower retailers with new functionality and customer data?
Digital Signage Is All Grown Up Now, Speaking with the Consumer, Not at the Consumer
I’ve been attending Digital Signage Expo (DSE) in Las Vegas for quite a number of years, and now more than ever, the show organizers, Exponation, deliver on their promise: a highly impactful four-day event jam-packed from early morning to late at night. The show demonstrated that if content is king, context is definitely queen. Location is the new cookie, and all the out-of-home industry stakeholders are now finally aligned for much success in the years to come.
From Zero-Click SERPs to Rabbit-Hole SERPs
Mihm to Blumenthal: Answer Optimization and Zero-Click SERPs seem to be gaining traction as concepts in the SEO industry, but as you pointed out in our previous conversation on this topic, Google’s moving well beyond simple answers and into journeys. Cindy Krum highlighted several examples of these new search journeys, which as I saw her presenting struck me as “rabbit-holes.”
Within 24 Hours, Further Signs That HUD’s Facebook Probe Could Upend Digital Ad Industry
What’s at stake in the Facebook housing discrimination probe and related investigations into Google and Twitter is whether the dissemination of online content—the news, product recommendations, advertising campaigns of all kinds, and entertainment—can and should be permitted on the basis of data collected on users’ personal characteristics and past behaviors. Should organizations, in industries as varied as entertainment, apparel, tech, and education, be permitted to use evolving technology to predict whom ads should target and thus who should see the content promoting Berkeley’s MBA program, the new housing development in Long Island City, or the hip sunglasses Warby Parker will never get me to buy? How does past human behavior and long-term inequality in various groups’ access to privileged resources shape ad targeting and the technology that automates it, and can the tech industry reach beyond those limitations to open up new futures instead of capitalizing on and reinforcing historical distinctions?
The news this week of the Trump administration’s first charges filed against a major tech company is the first step on our path to finding out.
Automated Ad Targeting Ensnares Facebook in a Discrimination Lawsuit
The lawsuit is big news not just for Facebook or for housing-related ads but for the digital advertising industry as a whole. That’s because it marks the first major federal attempt to use the resources of the law to curb ad targeting on the basis of racial discrimination. As interest in regulating broad tech spreads across the country and political spectrum, the lawsuit could prove a harbinger of harsher laws to come.
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The Road Ahead: What Autonomous Cars Teach Us About Marketing Automation