News and Analysis

Inform Your Multichannel Customer Experience Strategy

Agentz Uses Conversations to Drive First-Party Data Collection

The AI-powered customer engagement company Agentz helps businesses across more than 100 categories automatically respond to missed calls, texts, and website visits with the Agentz Automated Assistant. Of course, this helps businesses avoid losing leads and make sure they can get customers what they need faster, one imperative of the digital era. But now, Agentz’s software is paying data dividends.

Tools to Address Labor Shortages

Constructor Aims to Solve Cart Abandonment with Zero-Party Data

Last week, the search and product discovery platform Constructor announced a new solution designed to decrease cart abandonment rates for retailers. The company’s Quizzes product provides retailers a way to ask customers questions while they shop online, similar to how a sales associate might interact in-store.

ENGINE Rebrands as Big Village in Bid to Eliminate Silos in AdTech

The global advertising, technology, and data company ENGINE announced today that it has rebranded as Big Village in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. The company says the name reflects a renewed mission to eliminate siloed ways of industry thinking and reimagine what it means to be an integrated solutions firm in the current market. With this new rebrand, Big Village is bringing a full range of services under one roof, including adtech, media, insights, and creative experts.

Commentary

LBMA Presents Location Weekly: Bandit’s Mobile Ordering and AR Visualization at the NYT

In this week’s episode, Asif and Aubriana discuss the New York Times’ location-based air pollution AR visualization, Bandit taking them to mobile order ahead only for coffee, Dentsu Aegis Network India launching hyperlocal insights tools for OOH, Mood Media combining divisions to create Technomedia, Chick-fil-A wanting people to spend time together this holiday season, and the Salvation Army unveiling donations via Apple Pay & Google Pay.

5 Tips for Growing Affiliate Programs Through Social Channels

According to a recent study by the Performance Marketing Association (PMA), the affiliate marketing channel is expected to grow to over $6 billion by 2020. A Mediakix study found that US influencer marketing spend on Instagram alone is expected to grow $2.3 billion by 2020. The PMA study also indicated that content, bloggers, and social media accounted for 40% of ad spend by affiliate type in 2018, and that number is surely going up. All of these numbers support the idea that influencers and social media bring an incredible monetization opportunity to affiliate marketing.

Let’s look at five ways that brands active in the partner and affiliate channels can benefit from leveraging social media, and ultimately drive more revenue. 

Follow the Money: Will Wearables Inflect in 2020?

Apple is far ahead with Watch and Airpods, which may have sold 3 million units since Black Friday. Google meanwhile acquired Fitbit to buttress its wearables play. Amazon and Microsoft launched wearables lines in the past quarter, and smaller players like Bose and Snap are planting seeds for a wearables future.

There’s an underlying driver for this activity that goes back to the perennial analyst exercise of “following the money.” This is all about extrapolating product roadmaps based on tech giants’ motivations. This is often to future-proof their core businesses or diversify revenue in the face of maturing products.

Latest Posts

The Enduring Benefits of Mobile Apps for Brands

Thanks to a variety of factors including speed, user experience,  personalized messaging, reliable security, and fully customizable content, native apps increase your customers’ connection with your brand, driving more engagement and conversion than a mobile web product ever would.

Survey: Multi-Location Brands Continue to Shift Digital Budgets to Local

Many multi-location brands still find some traditional media more effective than most digital tactics and focus their digital efforts on the corporate e-commerce site or company branding. But an aggressive group of budget shifters are increasing spending across a variety of digital advertising and marketing vehicles, often with a local focus.

Street Fight Daily: Brands Shift Digital Spend to Local, The Enduring Benefits of Mobile Apps

BRANDS, PUBLISHERS, CUSTOMERS… Survey: Multi-Location Brands Continue to Shift Digital Budgets to Local… The Enduring Benefits of Mobile Apps for Brands…
Top 10 Programmatic Publishers of 2018…

Cheetah Digital Acquires Stellar Loyalty

The acquisition combines a comprehensive suite of digital marketing tools from Cheetah Digital with the loyalty expertise and huge repository of data commanded by Stellar, according to the release, allowing the pair to provide brands with a more powerful, all-in-one B2C marketing platform.

Street Fight Daily: Google Is Becoming the Web’s Transaction Layer, Cedato Releases Video Ad Tech for GDPR Era

TOP STORIES… Google’s Path to Becoming the Transaction Layer of the Web… Cedato Releases Contextual Programmatic Video Targeting Tool For the Post-GDPR Era… Google’s Grand Plan to Make AI Accessible to Developers and Businesses…

Simon Data Scores $20 Million for Big Data-Based Campaign Orchestration

Customer data platform Simon Data is announcing this morning $20 million in Series B venture funding. Led by Polaris Partners, the round will help Simon grow as it seeks to convince marketers that it offers solutions no other CDP can.

Cedato Releases Contextual Programmatic Video Targeting Tool For the GDPR Era

The machine learning-based tool, branded as Contextual Lookalike Targeting technology, relies on successful patterns of past video marketing campaigns (hence: contextual lookalike) to deliver future campaigns at ideal times and places based on an advertiser’s preferred KPIs.

Google’s Path to Becoming the Transaction Layer of the Web

“Google is controlling the entire local experience—discovery, presentation, and transaction—and there’s just nowhere for agencies to add value, or make any money from that value,” David Mihm tells Mike Blumenthal in their biweekly column.

LBMA Podcast: Uber, Hyundai & Amazon, Compass

On this week’s Location Based Marketing Association podcast: Compass, Taiwan’s STOMAP, Grocery app Cooklist, Diageo goes AR with Bulleit bourbon, Hyundai + Amazon, Uber’s new features, and HERE teams up with Locomizer.

Google Updates Search to Recommend Local Events Based on User Interests

Google is bringing the personalization zeitgeist to local event recommendations. The company reported on its blog Thursday that it is releasing a series of new features that will make it easier for users to find essential information about events of interest to them right on search engine result pages.