News and Analysis
Unstructured Data Becomes an Untapped Opportunity for Brands
Unstructured data now represents 80% to 90% of all new enterprise data, according to Gartner, but just 18% of organizations are taking advantage. Unstructured data, like product images, customer audio files, and comments from social media, represents an untapped opportunity for marketers.
How Brands Can Adjust Marketing to Reassure Customers amid Inflation
J. Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer, North America, at the data analytics and brand consulting company Kantar, checked in with Street Fight to share original research on customer attitudes toward inflation and discuss how marketers can shift practices to best address this challenge.
Commentary
Retail as a Service: Amazon Tips its Hand
Amazon has a knack for moving into new vertical segments and then applying its logistical mastery and economies of scale to carve out margins and undercut incumbents. Then, it doubles down by scaling things up to its signature high-volume/low-margin approach. As Jeff Bezos ruthlessly admits, “Your margin is my opportunity.”
The latest place for this to unfold is retail. No, we’re not talking about Whole Foods, though that’s part it (more on that in a bit). We’re talking about Amazon’s transformation of the in-store experience — upending and streamlining logistics just like it’s done in shipping and cloud computing.
Here are some predictions for how Amazon’s disruption of retail via licensing of its Go technology will upend the industry.
Turning a Unique Vanity Phone Number into Many
Just over half of Americans now use their personal mobile phone numbers as their only phone numbers. A majority of Americans also no longer have landline phones in their homes, and that’s convenient because anyone, anywhere in the world, can now reach you with just that one number. But the opposite is true in the business world, where brands can leverage new technologies to create multiple vanity numbers in order to engage their customers across local, regional, and national marketing campaigns.
That statistic I cited above isn’t just an interesting bit of trivia. It highlights how the phone, an ancient communications medium compared to social media platforms, chatbots, messaging apps, and email, remains important to a brand’s marketing efforts.
Will Images Drive a New Local Search Paradigm?
Blumenthal to Mihm: Obviously AI/ML vis-à-vis image recognition is going to play a huge role going forward in terms of discovery and conversion. But I would have to add that it is also critically important to Google as a way to engage the user in “immersive search” behaviors. That is, drawing the user deeper and deeper into Google so that they never feel the need or desire to go someplace else. This will further seal off the walled garden of local discovery search.
You can see this in the new search by photos feature where the user is led into a grid of visual business choices and ultimately served up the Local Finder via the View list link or, if they click on an image, a business profile. But to get to the phone number, the user had to totally commit to diving deeper into Google.
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Google Expands Into Fresh Food Marketing, Snap Expands Commerce for Brands
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Enters Deal with Carrefour to Sell Food Online in France… Snap Expands Commerce for Brands Within Stories… Report: Social Attracting Most Widespread Investment from Advertisers, Topping Search…
Street Culture: Pointy’s Collaborative Culture Grows Without Written Values
In one year, digital search company Pointy has grown from 13 to about 30 employees, moved into a new office, and seen significant growth in its product, which allows retailers to publishes their inventories online, attracting potential customers nearby. What hasn’t changed much is the company’s culture, says co-founder Mark Cummins.
Street Fight Daily: Buyers Lag on Mobile Programmatic, The Turn to Video Goes Multichannel
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… When It Comes to Mobile Programmatic, Buyers Are Behind… B2B Marketers Turn to Shorter Videos Across Many Channels to Engage Millennial Buyers… A Year After Amazon Devoured Whole Foods, Rivals Pursue Countermoves…
Street Fight Daily: Marketers Look for Data Beyond Duopoly, GDPR Spawns a Need for Innovation
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Concerns Grow Over Facebook, Google Duopoly as Marketers Prioritize Data Transparency… GDPR Panic May Spur Innovation in Data and AI… Native Mobile Video Ads 15 to 20 Seconds Long Show Highest Rates of Engagement…
Ericsson Emodo Launches Carrier-Verified Audience Solution
In a bid to address quality concerns currently looming over the mobile advertising industry, Ericsson Emodo is launching a product that uses carrier data at scale to pre-verify mobile audiences and inventory, and then makes those audience segments available through any major demand-side platform.
#SFSNYC: Moving Beyond Basic Location-Based Advertising Without Getting Creepy
In regard to guidelines pertaining to the ethical use of location data, Mark Risis, head of global data partnerships at IBM Watson, offered the following maxim: “Don’t do creepy stuff.” Risis as well as panelists from Zocdoc and Waze addressed the topic of location-based marketing and ethics in a panel at Street Fight Summit Wednesday.
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