News and Analysis

Changing Perceptions of Debt Make Buy Now, Pay Later More Lucrative

Changing perceptions of what debt means are leading to increased adoption of Buy Now, Pay Later payment methods, according to a new report by Reach3 Insights.

Geopath Analysis Pinpoints Optimal OOH Inventory for Last-Minute Holiday Ad Buys

As the OOH advertising industry continues to push past the pandemic, and be featured more prominently in omnichannel budgets, OOH is positioned to be a cornerstone of top brands’ strategies.

How Frequence is Enabling Hyperlocal Omnichannel Media Sales

Frequence recently won a Digiday award for helping a media company triple its omnichannel revenue with automated proposals, reporting, and workflows. 

Commentary

Can a Pandemic Inflect Local Commerce Tech?

Could forced adoption of alternative shopping methods like curbside pickup lead to user acclimation? Will millions of shoppers get exposed to the merits of these streamlined options and like what they see? Will new habits be born that sustain throughout normal times?

If so, these technologies — along with virtual-office enablement — could benefit from this period as a blessing in disguise for exposing their value propositions. But who stands to benefit most? We’ve identified five local commerce tech areas to which this could apply.

Mobile Commerce Bounces Back

Companies investing in existing user engagement are smart to do so. According to mobile monetization and marketing company ironSource, the average global cost to acquire a single paid install from an individual user in 2020 is $2.24 — which adds up quickly when you start to scale into thousands or hundreds of thousands of users.

So, while it’s important to keep spending on acquisition, retention and retargeting, informed by smart audience segmentation, are perhaps even more essential to ensuring app marketers are monetizing all of their users. 

The Fight Against Facial Recognition Tech

Microsoft and Amazon suspended their sales of facial recognition technology to police departments in recent weeks amid nationwide protests against police brutality. IBM went even further, ceasing its research on the subject altogether.

It might be clever and intuitive, but facial recognition technology is highly invasive. Little wonder, then, that across the world, people are joining the fight against its implementation.

Latest Posts

The Power of Micro-Location Technology

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

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

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

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.

How Forward-Thinking Brands Are Leveraging Automation

Global brands—the kind that can afford huge teams of in-house marketers—are increasingly relying on marketing automation tools to manage triggered email campaigns, prioritize leads for sales, and leverage mobile campaigns across their customers’ journeys.

Here is how five top global brands are deploying automation to improve the way they interact with customers.

Report: Upon Unlocking Phones, People Flock to Social, Messaging

Anyone with a smartphone unimmune to our pervasive cultural addiction with digital communication will be unsurprised: It’s WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Facebook that currently capture most of the attention when we mindlessly unlock our mobile devices.

That’s according to media measurement company Verto Analytics, which released a report just this morning on the earliest part of the mobile journey: what happens right when we unlock our phones some 50 times per day.

Heard on the Street, Episode 24: Lowering Friction for Video Ads Part 2, with Waymark

Video has always been a coveted ad medium for local businesses. It carries a certain vanity factor and a high perceived ROI (and real ROI, depending on other factors). But one barrier has always been the creative production, which often results in low quality. We’ve all seen those cheesy auto-dealer ads.

Fortunately, technical barriers are lowering, says Waymark CEO Nathan Labenz in the latest episode of Street Fight’s Heard on the Street Podcast. In this episode, we feature part II of our interview with Labenz and pick up where we left off in discussing distribution strategies. If half the battle in video ads is creation, the other half is distribution.

Borrell Associates Names Jim Brown President

Borrell Associates, a firm that provides cutting-edge insight for the location marketing industry, announced a leadership change on Tuesday. Jim Brown, previously vice president of sales, will take on the role of president, partnering with Corey Elliott, newly minted senior VP of local market intelligence, to help steer Borrell into the future.

5 CRM Platforms for the Cannabis Industry

Growers and dispensaries in certain states are required to submit reports that include information about their customers and sales to governing bodies. How easy, or difficult, these reports are to generate depends on the CRM platform that the business is using, and those platforms designed for marijuana businesses specifically tend to make the process as efficient as possible.

Here are five examples of CRM platforms designed for businesses in the cannabis industry, along with details about what makes each of these platforms unique.

4 Game-Changing Influencer Marketing Trends to Boost Your ROI in 2019

Many brands have decided to establish dedicated budgets for their influencer marketing campaigns. In fact, 79% of brands surveyed by marketing tech firm Relatable indicated they will have a dedicated budget for influencer marketing campaigns in 2019. Brands are catching onto the power of this medium.

Looking to get in on the action? There are four game-changing trends in influencer marketing that will help you boost the ROI of your influencer marketing campaign in 2019.