News and Analysis

OneScreen.ai Launches the ‘Yellow Pages of the OOH Industry’

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Rapid expansion in out-of-home advertising is making it harder for buyers and sellers to manage inventory and sales cycles. Now, with the launch of its new public directory, OneScreen.ai is hoping to provide industry-wide transparency and standards to enable streamlined media buying and selling.

Ad Tech and Privacy

InfoSum Launches Platform Sigma

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The data collaboration company InfoSum launched Platform Sigma last week to expand its ability to help clients navigate privacy-safe first-party data sharing and activation.

GumGum and JW Player Partner to Bring Contextual Targeting and Viewability to Video

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A new partnership between the digital advertising platform GumGum and JW Player, a video platform for broadcasters and publishers, could be a game changer for brands and agencies looking for deeper insights in video environments. 

Commentary

Amid COVID-19 Pandemic, Accurate Location Data Can Save Hassles and Even Lives

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Updating your location data management information to reflect new hours, store closures, different contact information or special announcements is important for business success in general. In the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic, maintaining accurate location data can actually have vital consequences for public health.

Yet a BrandMuscle study found that less than 60% of local business owners had even claimed their online business listings, which can lead to confusion about whether businesses are open or not. 

Location Weekly: Using Location Data to Track Covid-19

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In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Turkish firm Elektral developing vending machine for masks, wipes, and disinfectants; UNL raising $2M for smart address system; Wuhan bringing its famous Cherry Blossoms online; and Israeli startup Noveto bringing “smart audio bubbles” to digital signage. The episode also features a special discussion on using location data to track the virus.

Location Leaders Step Up to the Plate

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During the Covid-19 outbreak, we’re seeing tech companies step up to the plate in a mixture of altruistic and opportunistic moves. That’s everything from Comcast removing data caps to Amazon removing its paywall for streaming kids shows. But what about local specifically? Again, that’s where businesses are getting hit most.

We’ve seen moves in the local space over the past week from Facebook, Yelp, and Foursquare. Though there are several others, we’ll drill down on this representative sample. We’ll also give a shoutout to Google for its work to free up human and compute resources for local listings updates, covered Monday by Damian Rollison.

Latest Posts

Google Testing Restaurant Booking, Foreshadowing Ever Tighter Grip on Local Commerce

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The news is an important signal that local-commerce options like Reserve with Google will get sleeker and more dominant in the years to come. And it calls to mind a crucial local-search debate: Will Google SERPs and the many options for engagement with local brick-and-mortars on them effectively supplant the local business website as the crucial interface for interacting with customers?

Local Advertising’s Next Sleeping Giant: Uber

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Mike Boland: Given the attribution possibilities, its scale, recent delivery partnership with Starbucks, and existing Uber Eats infrastructure, Uber’s move into advertising looks pretty inevitable. Of course, it would have to gain internal competency as an ad company, so look for acquisitions or talent hires (or both) in 2019. And look for more rhetoric about the latest company to challenge the duopoly, this time in a very local way. 

Cannabis Retailer Uses Tech to Boost Employee Morale

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Old-school companies hosted picnics and holiday parties to keep their employees happy, but tech-focused startups in the cannabis industry are taking a decidedly more sophisticated approach.

home services

6 Lead-Generation Platforms for Local Businesses

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More than a quarter of consumers say they use the internet to find local businesses every day, and yet a whopping 29% of small businesses still don’t have websites. Here are six examples of lead-generation platforms that small businesses are using right now.

GMB App Adds Support for Service-Area Businesses

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As of late last week, Google is offering an update to the Google My Business app that adds support for service-area businesses. Earlier in November, a Local Search Forum blog post indicated that Google would be adding features to help such businesses with local customers.

Starbucks Partners with Uber to Launch On-Demand Delivery at 2,000 Locations

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Starbucks announced on Friday that it’s partnering with Uber to launch on-demand delivery at 2,000 locations. The partnership is a sign of the “near me” local search era for retail, one in which proximity and convenience have become paramount, outweighing even loyalty.

Will Consumer Privacy Be the Defining Issue of 2019?

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Though their terms are not identical, in essence both GDPR and CCPA are designed to give consumers the power to stop companies from collecting personal data, to review all personal data a company may have collected, and to request deletion of any stored data. Both regulations strike a major blow in favor of the concept that ownership of personal data ultimately resides with the individual and not with companies who may profit from it.

Efficacy of Google Posts Drops Following Relegation to Bottom of Knowledge Panel

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Following a seemingly arbitrary choice on Google’s part to move Posts to the bottom of the Knowledge Panel, their efficacy in boosting businesses’ local search presence seems to be dropping.

LBMA Podcast: Burger King Swipes McDonald’s Customers, Target Experiments with AR

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On this week’s LBMA podcast: AdMov, Xamoom celebrates “Silent Night,” Burger King swipes McDonald’s customers, Dunkin’ fools Portland, MA, Stella Artois’ beer-serving robot, Target selling Christmas trees with AR.

Cybersecurity Firm DEVCON Says It Can Knock Out ‘Bad Ads’ Costing Publishers Billions

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In this Q&A, cyber-security company DEVCON co-founder and CEO Maggie Louie details how she says her company halts “bad ads” before they victimize publishers and their readers.