News and Analysis

holiday spending

Report: High-Income Consumers Forge Ahead with Holiday Spending

The divide between the “haves” and the “have nots” is growing. According to a new report by Havas Media Group and the CX intelligence platform DISQO, the bifurcation in holiday spending intent between lower and higher-income consumers is stark — and it’s only getting larger.

Reaching Middle-Market Shoppers

Grocers Grapple with Reaching Middle-Market Shoppers

Of all the categories of retail shoppers, one stands out as being particularly difficult to reach — the middle-market shopper. Neither price sensitive nor premium, middle-market shoppers are unpersuaded by the availability of cheaper or more sustainable options. To engage this elusive group, one-to-one marketing is the only reliable option.

YouTube Shorts Coming to CTV

How Advertisers Can Capitalize on YouTube Shorts Coming to CTV

Curt Larson, chief product officer of Sharethrough, checked in with Street Fight to explain the significance of YouTube shorts’ move to CTV. He also shared thoughts on the increasingly intertwined future of CTV and mobile as marketing channels.

Commentary

Location Weekly: Pinterest Dives into Visual Commerce

In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association hosts Senior IT Manager of Mall of America, Patrick Wand.

The team also covers Incognia launching in US with its location behavior biometrics platform, Liquid Core Gum Co. installing Space Station touch-free gum dispensers, and Pinterest letting its users shop with their cameras.

Why Consumers Want Coupons — And What Kind They Value Most

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

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.

Latest Posts

Things Not Strings: Google’s New Hotel Profiles Exemplify Its Approach to Entities

Google’s Knowledge Graph ambitions are expanding to include obviating heavy reliance on secondary sources like Wikipedia and being able instead to classify and cross-reference information as a native, self-sustaining activity on web pages themselves. That’s what makes a recent patent filing different from the evidence of the Knowledge Graph we’ve already seen in the wild.

While this more ambitious way of surfacing information about entities is not yet standard, in researching Google’s new interface for hotels, I think I’m seeing evidence of a real-world example.

LBMA Vidcast: Octopus Ads in Ubers and Lyfts, Walmart and Google Team Up on Voice

On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Neiman Marcus + SalesFloor, Octopus ads in Uber & Lyft, Cleveland Cavaliers + Aramark use Apple business chat for food orders, CVS + Shipt, Snapchat testing “Status” feature, Walmart + Google voice ordering.

3 Revenue Growth Opportunities for SMB Marketing and Ad Agencies

While SMB digital marketing spend has seen a steady rise, SMBs are being more conservative about the agencies and vendors with which they partner. In the transparency era, consolidating spend with a select group of trusted agency partners that offer multiple core services is now the norm.

For agencies that cater to SMB brands, these trends have created opportunities and challenges. There is money to be had, but only organizations that differentiate themselves from the competition and can deliver clear ROI will benefit. So how can SMB agencies show their value to brands and ensure revenue growth? There are three opportunity areas, in particular, that can help.

Measuring the Impact of McDonald’s Push Into Automation, Personalization

With the right personalization and automation technology in place, McDonald’s is said to have plans to learn about customers through their ordering behaviors. More specifically, McDonald’s is planning to use Dynamic Yield’s technology to create a drive-thru menu that can be tailored based on factors like weather, restaurant traffic, and trending menu items. For example, when the temperature tops 100 degrees, milkshakes and ice cream sundaes might move into a prominent spot on the drive-thru menu board. When it starts raining outside, coffee and hot chocolate might take top billing.

Heard on the Street, Episode 23: Google, AI, 5G and Marketing Champagne

What do Google’s AI-fueled search results, 5G, and marketing champagne all have in common? They’re the central topics of a roundtable discussion on the latest episode of Street Fight’s podcast, Heard on the Street.

As we do quarterly, this is a bonus episode that puts aside our typical interview format and instead invites the leading thinkers from the Street Fight newsroom and executive ranks to discuss news and insights that are top of mind.

The High Stakes of Identity

Identification is the key to relevant, timely, and cohesive cross-channel marketing that increases sales and builds brand loyalty. Do it right, and you’ll achieve the kind of truly personalized marketing of which our predecessors could only dream. Here are the major tenets of a successful, privacy-aware strategy for storing data on consumers in a multichannel landscape.

Publishers Need to Pivot to First-Party Data

Rather than developing entirely new inventory strategies, which is a heavy lift, publishers can look to what they already have—rich behavioral, subscriber, and social data, most of it seriously under-leveraged. When used properly, first-party data can help publishers drive revenue in two ways—directly and indirectly. It can help them to stop working harder and start working smarter.

6 Customer Data Platforms for Brands

Customer data platforms dominated the conversation at the MarTech Conference in California earlier this month, as marketers shared how they’ve been able to pull data from multiple sources, combine that data into single customer profiles, and then make that data available to other marketing systems.

With so much hype surrounding customer data platforms right now, we decided to dig into the market and learn about some of the hottest players in the space. Here’s what we found.

Voice-Readiness Study Indicates Vast Majority of Businesses Fail Basic Listings Test

It only takes listing correct and comprehensive information on Google, Yelp, and Bing for a brand or small business to earn 90% on location management solution Uberall’s voice search readiness test. Yet only 4% of the businesses in the company’s latest study, which examined the voice preparedness of 75,000 listings, had correct info on all three of those major directories.

Government Regulation Is Marketers’ Most Common Concern About Data-Driven Initiatives

Changing political headwinds and increased media attention on data collection and privacy are apparently rattling marketers, who named government regulation as an obstacle to data-driven campaigns more than any other single factor. That’s per a survey of U.S. marketers by Winterberry Group and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, eMarketer reported.