News and Analysis

Marketers Want Multiple IDs to Replace Third-Party Cookies

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Marketers and publishers asking which will be the next-generation ID to rule them all are misguided, according to a new study by data solutions provider Lotame. The company surveyed 200 senior US marketing and publisher decision-makers, and 33% of marketers said they were open to “any number” of IDs, while 33% said three identity solutions would do the trick.

What’s Behind Google’s Fake Review Problem?

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In an analysis of more than 4 million store reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, Uberall and The Transparency Company found that Google has the highest average percentage of inauthentic reviews across business categories. More than one in 10 reviews on Google’s platform was identified as fraudulent or fake in Uberall’s analysis. The category with the highest percentage of fake reviews was locksmiths, while pharmacies came in as the category with the lowest percentage of fake reviews.

chatbot

Why Are So Many Chatbots Missing the Mark?

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The use of chatbots for retail customer service has been on the rise for years. According to a report by Drift, use of chatbots as a brand communication channel increased by 92% between 2019 and 2020. Nearly one quarter of consumers used chatbots to communicate with a business last year. But how many of those interactions were positive, and how many customers left those interactions feeling like their issues were resolved?

Commentary

Embracing Hyperlocal Creative at Scale

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The challenge of authentic content is doing it at scale, in a way that is brand safe, across all markets. While creating custom content could seem like a feasible task for international companies with endless resources at their fingertips, even legacy brands all too often struggle with personalized, custom, local content at scale. It’s equally as challenging for local businesses like franchises, small agencies, and Mom-and-Pop shops who are charged with many business tasks outside of content creation. One of the pivotal concerns in digital marketing as it applies to content and content creation is having an efficient process to scale content production. 

So, how can franchises, local businesses, and brands scale their creative marketing content to better reach local markets?

How Long Will Google’s “Calculative PR” Playbook Work in Local Search?

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Mihm: The engineering mindset that millions of spammy listings in a corpus of hundreds of millions of legitimate listings worldwide, or a (hundred million?) spam reviews in a corpus of billions of legitimate reviews worldwide, are simply “edge cases” that are beneath Google to prioritize reflects a profound lack of empathy for how their technology impacts fellow human beings — both consumers and especially small business owners and their employees.

Blumenthal: Absolutely agree. And a related problem is that they see customer service in the same context: as an engineering/cost-benefit problem to solve, not as a way to improve their product. As such they see the last 5, 10 or 15% errors in their big data solutions as just a cost of doing business that they have no responsibility to solve. 

How Targeting Fuels Audience Activation and Satisfaction

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Consumers benefit from targeting. When there are clear rules and guardrails in place for tracking and targeting, shoppers enjoy a more relevant online experience and a panoply of ad-funded digital services.

Traditional ads still have a place in the marketing mix, of course. But the future of marketing is digital. Online ad spend is expected to surpass traditional ad spend (likely for good) this year. How is it that targeting, while respecting privacy, makes the consumer internet better?

Latest Posts

Unpacking the Increasingly Complex Local SERP

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“While I think [these local ad changes] might be better for many small businesses AND consumers, it gives Google a great deal of power to approve or disapprove participants,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm in their biweekly column.

People Are Talking About You: The Hidden Value of User-Generated Content

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Simply put, insights gleaned from reviews can help you do business better. Though reviews may contain bias of various kinds, they are still the best source you can find of detailed feedback from real customers.

Street Fight Daily: How Google’s Ad Changes Affect Local Biz, Snap Ups Its Ad Game

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Unpacking the Increasingly Complex Local SERP… People Are Talking About You: The Hidden Value of User-Generated Content… Media Buyers: Snap Is Focused on Enabling Commerce in Ads…

Understanding the Proxies That Can Undermine Location Data

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For marketers, the ability to deploy technology that identifies and bypasses online users who may be masking their locations and digital traits yields improvement in the form of targeted campaigns and fewer wasted impressions.

LBMA Podcast: Verizon, Omnicom, Ericsson & Placecast

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This Week in Location Based Marketing is a weekly video podcast from the Location Based Marketing Association with Asif Khan, Rob Woodbridge & Aubriana Lopez. On the show: Denver airport, LinkNYC, O2’s Weve, Radius8, Selfridges.

How Local Healthcare Providers Can Imitate Advances in Retail to Boost Efficiency

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Providers need to do, ironically, what the best retailers do: make the experience better. To that end, data management is key. Here are some steps providers can take to address patients’ need for access and control.

Street Fight Daily: Thumbtack Brings AI to Local Services, Amazon Go Model to Expand

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… How Thumbtack Creates Work By Giving the Yellow Pages an AI Twist… Amazon Plans to Open As Many As Six More Amazon Go Stores This Year… Twitter Tightened Up the Requirements for Its Amplify Publisher Program…

Local Media Consortium Partners With IAS to Fight Web Ad Fraud

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To fight the pervasive web fraud crisis, the Local Media Consortium, which represents more than 75 local news media companies with 1,700+ digital publications, is partnering with the global data firm Integral Ad Science (IAS), which each day measures and analyzes the quality of 500 billion media metrics.

Street Fight Daily: Google Debuts ‘Auto Ads,’ Digital Media Titan Vox Cuts Staff En Masse

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Debuts AdSense ‘Auto Ads’ with Machine Learning… Vox Media Cuts About 50, Scales Back Social Video… Snapchat’s E-Commerce Strategy Hit a New High…

A Vision for One of Tech’s Most Valuable Startups: The Airbnb Card

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Airbnb has already created a trusted network. It now merely needs to extend that trust to get local hosts and merchants working together to create great experiences for their mutual customers.