News and Analysis
Here’s What Happens When Brands Start Micro-Communities for Digital Engagement
“[Micro-communities] foster a collaborative relationship between brands and customers. So instead of spying on consumers through cookies, brands can simply ask consumers for feedback and offer them recommendations based on their likes and dislikes,” says Philip Smolin, chief platform officer at 100.co, an AI-powered consumer brand group that works in the CPG space.
Evocalize Banks $12 Million to Scale its Local Digital Marketing Platform
Seattle-based collaborative marketing startup Evocalize has grabbed $12 million in Series A funding for its data-driven digital marketing solution designed for local businesses and the real estate industry.
Live Commerce Guides Retailers to Success in the Metaverse
Immerss Co-Founder Patrick Jacobs says his company is working with a number of retailers to leverage live commerce as a way to blend the physical and digital worlds. Jacobs says sales rates with live commerce are on par with or better than in-store conversion rates, and that merchants jumping into live commerce now will be better prepared for the metaverse boom in the future.
Commentary
Connecting the Customer Journey from Online to Offline
The blurring lines among search, social, and e-commerce only muddy the water when it comes to determining the customer’s journey to conversion. So, how can advertisers accurately attribute their marketing dollars to customer wins? Increasingly, marketers are turning to a multi-touch attribution strategy that includes both online and offline conversions, thereby moving away from simplistic last-touch attribution models.
Mobile Is Always Local: Thoughts on the Future of Online-to-Offline Commerce
The other day, Uber Eats announced a new service that struck me at first as a little surprising but, once I absorbed the idea, seemed strangely inevitable. In select cities like Austin and San Diego, you can now order food ahead of time, monitor your order status, and arrive at the restaurant just in time to begin dining, your table ready and waiting for you. This on-demand dine-in service is meant to remove time and effort from the experience of eating out, and it may also help restaurants fill empty tables during off-peak times by enabling special time-based incentives.
When I say it seems inevitable that an app would eventually “solve” waiting for your food at restaurants, I have two things in mind. The first is a quote from Twitter co-founder Ev Williams that, to me, strikes at the root of contemporary trends in innovation. The second point I want to observe here is that the highly representative user experience created by Uber Eats is taking place on a mobile phone.
Publishers (And Everyone Else), Beware Amazon
Amazon’s success comes at a cost for publishers. Its growth means that retail and CPG brands are shifting digital spend away from publishers, siphoning off a key source of revenue. How can publishers compete? Their survival may come down to better ways of monetizing existing channels like email, as well as more effective use of their greatest asset: first-party data.
The hope for publishers lies in email and the power of the email address. With email, publishers have a logged-in channel that’s virtually fraud-free. Email represents a direct relationship with the consumer and one that is detached from platform intermediaries that have unfairly claimed revenue and attribution from the rightful influencer: the publisher. And contrary to popular belief, email is still a channel where people spend over five hours a day. What’s more, email is impervious to subtle shifts of an algorithm that force a publisher to buy the right to reach people, as opposed to owning the relationship with those who have requested a publisher’s content in the first place.
Latest Posts
Unpacking the Increasingly Complex Local SERP
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Street Fight Daily: Google Debuts ‘Auto Ads,’ Digital Media Titan Vox Cuts Staff En Masse
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
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.
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