News and Analysis
Retailers Use AI to Combat Shrinking Seasonal Workforce, Surging Customer Demands
Increases in customer service tickets are expected to come just as seasonal workforces are hitting all-time lows. According to Puneet Mehta, founder and CEO of the AI platform Netomi, about 25% fewer agents are working in seasonal customer service roles now than before the pandemic. Customer service accounts for a lot of the seasonal roles retailers have traditionally hired for, and now retailers are looking at leveraging technology to fill that labor gap.
What You Need to Know about the Google My Business Name Change
The GMB name change brings with it a fair degree of uncertainty. Google may be retaining, for instance, the model of an API that helps partners manage listings for both SMBs and larger brands, but if the company is simultaneously building out a snazzy new interface for those same multi-location brands to manage Google profiles on their own, does this fact represent an existential threat to listing management companies?
Marketers Want Multiple IDs to Replace Third-Party Cookies
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.
Commentary
Embracing Hyperlocal Creative at Scale
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?
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
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
Street Fight Daily: Thumbtack Brings AI to Local Services, Amazon Go Model to Expand
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
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.
Pursuant Health, Vistar Media Look to Change How Brands Connect In-Store
In a move that could impact the way marketers connect with more than 30 million shoppers inside physical stores around the country, Pursuant Health is partnering with the location-based advertising technology firm Vistar Media to provide better access to its digital advertising inventory.
National Brands Must Take Advantage of Tech and Reap Benefits of Going Local
The marketplace is now offering media inventory that can be localized even in channels like national magazine titles. Advances in data management platforms, programmatic exchanges, and ad operations workflows allow national brands to go local at scale in order to reach customized audience segments.
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Scaling Seasonal SEO Across Locations With AI Insights