News and Analysis
Marketers Are Changing How They Think About OOH — Here’s Why
Location data is increasingly being used to help retailers target outdoor ads to specific groups of consumers, while the ability to combine artificial intelligence with advanced techniques like travel pattern analysis is giving brands an even better understanding of customer routes.
Retailers Grapple with Decreased Loyalty from Omnichannel Shoppers
Sixty-nine percent of consumers say they expect a consistent cross-channel customer experience. And that’s just the beginning.
Report: Black Friday Is Back — With a Vengeance
According to the findings of a new consumer survey commissioned by UserTesting and conducted by the market research company OnePoll, 43% of shoppers say they miss the frenzy of in-store Black Friday shopping and 42% say in-store shopping is more important now than pre-pandemic.
Commentary
Top 5 CRO Tools That Will Increase Conversions for Your Small Business
CRO is the process of setting up a website in a way that leads site visitors to take action and purchase products. As a result, they are converted into customers of the business.
If you have a site that has high traffic, that is naturally a good sign. But it doesn’t mean much unless that traffic leads to conversions. Based on current research, we’ve compiled the top 5 CRO tools that you can use to increase conversions and bring in greater profit.
Using Zoom During Covid-19 Lockdown Exposes Users To New Data and Privacy Cyberattacks
Phishing attempts, coronavirus-themed fraud, and cyberattacks are increasing exponentially as fraudsters pummel organizations of all sizes in their attempts to gain access to sensitive information. They know just where to find that sensitive information, thanks to the inexperienced remote workforce that has been forced to work from home at this time.
In light of the pandemic, the usage of applications that enable virtual meetings has skyrocketed. One of the worst-hit platforms has been Zoom. Relatively unknown up until a few months ago, its use has soared in ways that the developers did not foresee before the pandemic struck.
Fortunately, there are steps people can take to keep their information secure.
Location Weekly: Verve, AppLift, and PubNative Join Forces as Verve Group
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association hosts Tanner Gatlin, the senior live content creator of NFL Media.
The team also covers Spotify and Chiquita Bananas teaming for prizes and playlists, PubNative and Applift joining with Verve to form Verve Group, and Coors Light’s #CouldUseABeer campaign.
Latest Posts
Increasingly, Your Brand Is Its Reviews
Mihm to Blumenthal: The famous Jeff Bezos quote comes to mind: “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” Increasingly, the room is not a physical place but a virtual one—and it’s not a place you own. Reviews really bring the need to run a decent business at your core into stark relief.
As Visual Search Takes Off, Brands Adapt to Shifting Demands
Visual search and image recognition are capturing the attention of investors, retail insiders, and everyday consumers. To find out more about where visual search is heading, and what marketers can do to adapt their strategies with the latest trends in mind, we checked in with Apu Gupta, CEO of Curalate, a social commerce company that turns images and videos into storefronts.
LBMA Vidcast: McDonald’s & Waze, Lego & Snapchat
On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Hermes AR package delivery, NFC forum’s payment standard, Lego + Snapchat + Kabooki, McDonald’s + Waze billboards, Geon Network, Glympse partners with Albertsons.
The Future of Location in Retail: Beyond Ad Targeting
Location data is serving as the conduit to connect consumer-facing marketing initiatives with behind-the-scenes merchandising and logistics. According to a survey by Blis, WBR Insights, and Future Stores, the majority of retail marketers (71%) have some type of location strategy in place, with the primary goal being to drive foot traffic and trigger location-based mobile advertising. That’s not a particular surprise, given how popular the latest location-based marketing tactics have become. More surprising, however, is how common it has become for retailers to use location data for local product and inventory search (60%) and localized online customer service (51%).
Four Keys to Ensure Your Brand Has Local Authenticity Online
Taking time to ensure that your brand is represented authoritatively and genuinely online helps build a solid connection with your audience. But how does your brand communicate that authenticity at a local level? Here are four essential ways to build local authenticity through your localized social marketing efforts.
Heard on the Street, Episode 21: Lowering Friction for Video Ads, 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.
Amazon’s Dash Buttons Have Met Their End. Does Their Demise Truly Signal Failure?
Dash buttons were met with detractors right from the get go. Some called out the “hideous” design, while others lambasted Amazon for creating $5 buttons that would inevitably end up in landfills. But at Amazon, the Dash button initiative isn’t considered a failure. Rather, the project was designed to get consumers more comfortable with the “connected home” concept and the idea of shopping through devices other than desktop computers and smartphones.
WeQ Launches Influencer Agency, Backing up Influencers with Analytics
Global mobile advertising firm WeQ announced on Tuesday that it’s launching an agency dedicated to influencers, aiming to pair the analytical power of a broader ad tech firm with the new possibilities for branding offered by the influencer sector of the digital marketing industry.
Human Judgment, Automation, and the Future of Ad Tech
For now, I propose two major concerns—two challenges, even, for further thought—surrounding AI for the ad tech industry. The first is that the datafication of human experience that has allowed for precise ad targeting needs to be radically reconsidered, not just in terms of what can be done to obtain the consent of consumers for data collection, as the rising privacy movement has called tech companies to consider, but also in terms of what is lost and what is truly gained when the attributes of real people are transformed into consumer data. The second is that the human-machine hybrid decision-making model, while surely the best available in a hypothetical set that also includes human-only and machine-only models, will have to grapple with the bias and poor decisions of the humans who program the machines that will take on the task of regulating large platforms at scale.
Foursquare Launches Hypertrending, A Next-Gen View of the Hot Spots in Town
Foursquare announced on Friday, coinciding with the ten-year anniversary of its launch at SXSW, a new feature called Hypertrending that shows users the most popular places where people are meeting up around them.
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem