News and Analysis
How Brands Are Using Interactivity to Shorten the Purchase Cycle
With brands expected to pull back on media spending during the first half of the year, media buyers are looking at stretching their ad budgets to activate in more meaningful ways.
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.
Commentary
AI’s Promise and Challenges for Martech
In this article, we will discuss the ways artificial intelligence is changing marketing and why this marks a positive change. This article will also discuss how metadata can be more revealing than event data itself when collected and analyzed in aggregate, and why making all this data functional is the main strength of AI technology.
The Problems with a Band-Aid Approach to Data Governance and Compliance
As more privacy laws pop up, blanket policies and compliance band aids could result in brands cutting away 20% to 40% of the data they would have previously collected. A big portion of that data is likely usable in different scenarios, but a failure to operate at the edge means that brands are cutting away portions to be on the safe side.
Rather than jettison huge chunks of data because it may not be compliant, the industry needs to adopt granular data governance controls that provide a view into the circumstances of every piece of data.
How Advertisers Can Turn the Facebook Boycott into a Transformative Moment
It would be helpful if about 20 of the large brands boycotting Facebook put their money where their mouth is and invested in the establishment of a data and publisher sharing network.
The next step would be identifying the media publisher outlets as partners. The co-op would need to negotiate a performance-based publisher relationship, which would effectively increase content monetization for publishers’ content channels.
Latest Posts
This Largely Brick-and-Mortar Industry Is Resisting Digital Disruption
Despite Amazon’s high-profile acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, grocery is the bastion of brick-and-mortar shopping proving unusually resistant to a takeover by digital channels. At least, that is the vision of consumers, only 15% of whom say they are excited about the technical “revolution” in grocery, according to a new report on the future of retail by Walker Sands.
Studying the Relationship Between Phone Price and Income
The results of our study show that the more expensive your phone is, the more likely you are to come from a higher income bracket. Our model predicts that, for every dollar that the average price for a cell phone in a given zip code increases, the median income for that zip code will also increase by $122.70 — in other words, by a fairly significant amount.
Letter From the Editor: Awarding the Innovators
We’ll present awards at a future event to be announced soon. The awards include several categories of media and advertising and allow you the opportunity to apply for consideration. Enrollment started last month and runs through July 12. You see all the categories, rules, and apply here.
The awards will be a central part of Street Fight’s plan to continue being an authority on innovation and transformation in the location-based media and advertising worlds. We’re excited to acknowledge champions and innovators driving success in these key areas for Street Fight’s market coverage.
July Focus: Retail Transformation in the Amazon Age
Street Fight is rolling into July with the monthly theme Disrupting Retail: a look at how retail continues to transform, driven by competition from Amazon and key trends like “retail-as-a-service.”
But why is this important to Street Fight (and to you)? 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).
Startups Adapt to Shifting Privacy Standards
Two steps forward, one step back. That’s what it can feel like to be a technology provider in the location marketing space right now, struggling to strike a balance between the demands of brand marketers and growing concerns over consumer privacy and data regulation.
That push and pull is challenging vendors in the location marketing space. At the same time their firms should be seeing exponential growth, data regulations—including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s forthcoming Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)—are establishing new rules for innovation.
But some companies are embracing the regulation as a challenge to innovate in its own right.
In the Wake of Spam Reports, Google Focuses on Brand and Small Business Engagement
Google’s calculated risk in creating a low bar for verification works out fine in a world where most business owners simply want to gain legitimate access to their own listings, and most businesses do operate within those ethical boundaries. But as we’ve seen elsewhere at this stage in the evolution of social networks, fraud and deceptive manipulation have become a kind of ghost in the machine, dominating darker sectors of the local marketplace and creating an atmosphere of distrust that may eventually prove more broadly contagious.
All of this is only possible when lots of activity is consolidated on a few platforms. Just as fake accounts attempting to engineer the 2016 election thrived in the vast and complex Facebook ecosystem, so too has Google’s dominance in local attracted its own horde of opportunists, drawn like moths to its flame. Indeed, fraud in local listings is just the latest in a long history of attempts, from link farms to keyword spam, to manipulate loopholes in Google’s regulations and algorithms.
LBMA Vidcast: Facebook’s Libra, Carrefour Tests Facial Recognition
On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency, L.L. Bean and Uber for Backyard Campsite, Carrefour tests facial recognition, 7Eleven delivers Cheetos AR experience, Kyruus + Brandify partner, PromoRepublic raises 2 million Euros.
Vendors Rush to Bring Privacy Verification Solutions to Market
The demand for data privacy is at an all-time high, just as consumer trust in the technology space is at an all-time low. Advertisers are grappling with wasted ad spend and uncertainty over ad verification. The market is in disarray, and technology vendors are hoping they have a solution to the problem.
Just this month, the offline consumer intelligence and measurement company Cuebiq launched a new verification solution for third-party data. The solution gives advertisers verifiable proof of compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
Consumers Welcome Some Automated Business Messaging, But Humans Must Tag Along to Help
More than half of consumers are frustrated by customer-service situations in which they can only interact with automated agents, and nearly one in five even reporting feeling angry in those situations. That’s per a new survey of U.S. consumers conducted by The Harris Poll and commissioned by call tracking and analytics firm Invoca.
Texting Allows Marketers to Reach Customers Where They Spend the Most Time
Seventy-six percent of consumers are already receiving texts from businesses, and a majority of consumers across all age groups would prefer that more businesses take up texting as a mode of communication, a new report from business text messaging platform ZipWhip indicates.
A whopping 83% of Gen-Z respondents and 82% of millennials said they “wish more businesses” would use texting. Even for older generations, that number made up a more than slight majority, including 76% of Gen-Xers and 64% of Baby Boomers.
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AI Won’t Fix Advertising – It May Scale Its Chaotic Nature