News and Analysis
Report: Retail Lags in Omnichannel Customer Service
Retailers around the globe learned to adapt during the pandemic, quickly pivoting to offer curbside pickup, mobile payments, and online storefronts. Despite making strides in digital adoption, a new report finds that many retailers are still missing the mark on omnichannel customer service.
How Will the Metavearth Materialize?
Back to the metaverse’s meaning, concrete definitions are elusive … mostly because they don’t exist yet. But broadly speaking, there are two metaverse tracks. One involves virtual and synchronous worlds. The other adds digital dimension and context to the physical world. Both will take years to materialize.
Commentary
What Facebook’s Second Wave of Data Privacy Tools Means for Advertisers
Facebook finally rolled out the ‘Clear History’ feature, now known as the ‘Off-Facebook Activity Tool.’ This tool will show users a summary of the apps and websites that have shared their user data with Facebook and gives users the opportunity to control what information, if any, is shared with these websites. According to Facebook, the company “won’t know which websites you visited or what you did there, and won’t use any of the data you disconnect to target ads to you on Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger.”
As advertisers, it’s important for us to understand how to prepare for the impact and to keep these updates top of mind as we move further into the second half of the year.
LBMA Vidcast: Factual Returns to Europe; Gimbal Releases Trends
On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Factual returns to Europe post-GDPR, WeChat releases new facial rec. payments, Curiosity Lab teams with Georgia Tech, Gimbal releases Trends, iOS 13 changes location game, McDonald’s acquires Apprente. Special Guest: Kipp Jones, Chief Technology Evangelist, Skyhook.
Is Consent Enough to Make Audio Recordings Safe for Human Processing?
Recently, a number of high-profile tech firms have been uncovered permitting human employees to access private conversations consumers believed were only processed by AI.
Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa have all been placed in the limelight, and now Facebook has also come under fire for letting human employees access sensitive personal conversations for transcription purposes.
In the case of AI assistants, private conversations are primarily harvested from consumers who own and use their devices directly. However, there is an emerging body of evidence that these technologies are also harvesting secondary persons’ conversations — completely unknown to those individuals.
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The Bifurcation of the Local SEO Services Market
“The changing nature of search and the increasing localization are making “traditional SEO” harder, more expensive, and less productive of ROI, and that should lead every agency to assess what they are delivering and to whom,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm in their latest biweekly column.
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