News and Analysis

Inform Your Multichannel Customer Experience Strategy

Chatbots Get Faster and Supply Helpful Data

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Deploying chatbots effectively will require smarter, faster-learning chatbots. And that’s what Botco.ai is bringing to market with Instachat Builder, “a new product that accelerates AI chat deployment by allowing Botco.ai customers to directly train Botco.ai’s chatbot on any type of text information.”

Retailers Turn to AI to Combat Burnout, Decrease Merchandiser Workloads

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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. 

How Retailers Are Using Pop-Ups to Drive Customers In-Store

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One pillar of most in-store marketing strategies is to transform shopping into a share-worthy experience. This, retailers bet, is a way to make hitting stores worth it when Amazon is only ever a click away. Pop-ups are one iteration of that strategy.

Commentary

Location Weekly: Google Partners with Burberry on AR Shopping, Amazon Delivers Covid-19 Tests

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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

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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.

Treat the Economic Symptoms of Coronavirus with Proactive Brand Management

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In the midst of this uncertainty, your business’s online visibility probably isn’t top of mind—rightfully so. 

Nevertheless, communication is key to your brand management strategy in times like these. It’s important to make your customers aware of any changes in your business operations. Below are three tactics you can use to bolster your brand management as the coronavirus sends shockwaves through the global economy.

Latest Posts

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.

dataPlor: The Importance of Personal Relationships and Other Key Findings from Emerging Market Small Business Survey

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At dataPlor, we know that the best way to gather data and insights on emerging market small businesses is in person. We sent our general manager in Guadalajara out on a mission to understand how hyperlocal businesses communicate with customers and potential business partners and suppliers. He spent a week speaking first-hand to small business owners about their customer outreach strategies and how they chose potential businesses partners. Here’s what we found.

Retail as a Service: Amazon will Create (and Destroy) with Cashierless Checkout Solution

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Mike Boland: The innovation including and surrounding cashierless checkout goes beyond payments to affect a broader set of functions like supply chain, inventory management, and store layouts. It’s like a retail toolkit in a box, with cash-flow friendly pricing, à la SaaS. You may have heard of it: It’s called retail as a service (RaaS), and it could transform the next decade of retail. Amazon will lead the way.

Beyond Proximity Offers: The Second Act of Beacons is Underway

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Beacons have grown into a nuanced component of successful mobile marketing. We’ve learned what they do best—strengthen advertiser approaches to metrics and measurement as well as the relevance and contextual richness of on-the-ground, in- or near-store experiences—and we’ve figured out that while push notifications can be a part of the story, they aren’t the main narrative.

Digital Ad Trends to Watch in 2019, Mobile to Account for 71% of Digital Ad Spend

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Programmatic SSP Pubmatic released on Tuesday morning an elaborate report detailing digital ad trends to watch in 2019. The highlights include a look into how mobile, video, and of course programmatic itself will continue to evolve in the coming year, reshaping the way brands reach customers.

Location Data Industry Gets Huge Wake-Up Call on Monday

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Platforms, brands, and vendors benefiting from the reams of location data used to hit consumers with highly targeted ads should be paying attention to a change suggested by Google and Facebook’s appearances before government authorities, a New York Times exposé out Monday, and most importantly the impending arrival of GDPR-like legislation in the United States: 2019 will be the year privacy actually matters, posing a potentially devastating threat to the status quo of the location-based data and marketing industries.

How to Better Connect with Consumers via Mobile Coupons

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Dan Slavin: It’s not just smartphone use that is growing—the number of people totally dependent on these devices to access the internet is rising as well. Both segments are projected to continue to show strong growth. Yet some marketers and retailers are struggling with attracting these users with offers and coupons.

Evolving Our Lens for Local Ranking Factors

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Blumenthal and Mihm: We in the Local Search industry are not served by relying so heavily on traditional SEO logic and tools—in our approach to the Local Pack, our understanding of the ranking factors, and even what we suggest to clients as appropriate activities.