News and Analysis
Retailers Turn to AI to Combat Burnout, Decrease Merchandiser Workloads
As retailers look at getting more done and freeing up their staff to focus on high-value tasks, interest is growing in the use of AI to handle the mundane tasks that take up too much of a merchandiser’s time — like fixing typos on e-commerce websites and researching underperforming product categories. Retailers are also using AI to flag when new products show signs of being more popular than expected, so merchandisers can act quickly and notch strategic wins.
5 Retailers Using Live Shopping to Boost Back-to-School Sales
Meta will reportedly shut down its live shopping feature on Facebook in October, but that doesn’t mean the concept of live shopping is dead. Across the retail marketing space, multi-location retailers are investing in live-stream content as a way to leverage the popularity of social media and engage with Gen Z consumers this back-to-school shopping season.
Commentary
4 Mobile and Location Trends for Brands to Keep an Eye On
Believe it or not, this is the smartphone’s third decade. When it comes to mobile apps and location-based marketing, so much has changed since the advent of the iPhone in 2007.
While it’s hard to predict what will become of mobile and location-based media in the next 10 years, it’s fair to prognosticate what we can expect for the rest of this year and beyond. Here are four mobile and location trends brand marketers need to watch.
Location Weekly: Google Partners with Burberry on AR Shopping, Amazon Delivers Covid-19 Tests
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Amazon delivering Covid-19 test kits to residents in Seattle, Wirecard partnering with Klarna, Signify releasing “snap-in” IoT sensors for luminaries, Burberry partnering with Google for AR shopping, Cibo Express bringing Amazon cashierless tech to airports, and Wingstop shifting OOH budget to hoodies.
Local Advertising in the Time of Social Distancing
Many of us are facing a reality in which #QuarantineLife is the new normal — at least for the foreseeable future. Even with offices temporarily shutting their doors and the worldwide workforce moving to a remote-based culture, the tools provided by local social advertising can help businesses, perhaps especially those dealing with store closures, drive their goals forward.
Latest Posts
Google Testing Restaurant Booking, Foreshadowing Ever Tighter Grip on Local Commerce
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
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.
Will Consumer Privacy Be the Defining Issue of 2019?
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.
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Beyond Search: AI Visibility the New Growth Lever for MULO Brands