News and Analysis
As AI Changes Local Discovery, Scorpion Bets on Scale and Technology
The future of local marketing may depend less on generating leads and more on connecting marketing activity directly to business outcomes. The Scorpion acquisition of 1SEO reflects a growing industry shift toward AI-powered platforms that help businesses compete in an increasingly complex discovery environment. Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how consumers discover, evaluate, and choose […]
What Political Campaigns Can Teach Marketers About Hyperlocal Media Strategy
Political advertising has long served as a testing ground for innovations that eventually make their way into mainstream marketing. Campaigns operate under compressed timelines, face relentless pressure to prove effectiveness, and often have only a single opportunity to influence behavior before Election Day. As a result, many of the strategies developed in political media—from audience […]
Yext Wants to Be the Infrastructure Layer for Agentic Marketing
For most of the last decade, local marketing technology was built around helping brands rank in search engines. That model is beginning to change as AI-powered search experiences, agentic marketing, recommendation engines, and conversational assistants play a larger role in how consumers discover and evaluate businesses. According to Yext’s recent Consumer Search Behaviors report, 28% […]
Commentary
Why MULOs Need a Localized Unstructured Citation Strategy
Citation management for multi-location businesses has long been a structured affair, consisting of claiming listings for each location, ensuring NAP data is up to date and consistent across those listings, and repeating for every location in the portfolio. These types of structured citations still matter for local SEO, but with the advent of AI-powered search, […]
AI Is a Multiplier: Why Better Data Drives Better Results
For too long, the conversation around AI has centered on capability. What it can do. What it might unlock. But capability without underlying quality will only scale the wrong things. AI amplifies the marketing data that’s already there. Done right, it accelerates insight, boosts creativity, and enables rewarding collaboration. Done wrong, it amplifies risk, bias, […]
Broadcast Is Losing Ad Dollars Despite Massive Reach
The advertising industry has spent a decade solving for targeting. Most of the major platforms have gotten quite good at it. That is not where broadcast is losing. Broadcast is losing on proof. The buyers moving budgets to Netflix, Amazon, and programmatic platforms aren’t doing it because those platforms have bigger audiences. In most markets, […]
Latest Posts
AI Is a Multiplier: Why Better Data Drives Better Results
For too long, the conversation around AI has centered on capability. What it can do. What it might unlock. But capability without underlying quality will only scale the wrong things. AI amplifies the marketing data that’s already there. Done right, it accelerates insight, boosts creativity, and enables rewarding collaboration. Done wrong, it amplifies risk, bias, […]
Why Programmatic Audio Is Winning New Attention From Advertisers
As marketers search for incremental reach across an increasingly fragmented media landscape, audio advertising is emerging as a powerful complement to CTV, social, and digital video. A new partnership between Basis and DAX highlights how programmatic audio, audience targeting, and omnichannel campaign management are reshaping media planning. While connected TV, retail media, digital video, and […]
Broadcast Is Losing Ad Dollars Despite Massive Reach
The advertising industry has spent a decade solving for targeting. Most of the major platforms have gotten quite good at it. That is not where broadcast is losing. Broadcast is losing on proof. The buyers moving budgets to Netflix, Amazon, and programmatic platforms aren’t doing it because those platforms have bigger audiences. In most markets, […]
SOCi Hits 300,000 AI Agents as Automation Goes Mainstream
AI agents are quickly moving beyond experimentation and becoming part of the operating infrastructure behind enterprise marketing. That trend was on display this week as SOCi announced that it has surpassed 300,000 deployed Genius Agents™, a milestone the company says establishes the largest deployed agentic workforce in marketing. The announcement underscores how rapidly enterprise brands […]
OOH Pushes Deeper Into Performance Media
OOH advertising has long benefited from its physical presence in the real world. But as marketers increasingly demand the same level of attribution, interoperability, and performance accountability they expect from digital channels, the industry is racing to modernize how the medium is measured. That effort is now accelerating through a new initiative led by the […]
AI Agents Are Reshaping SEO for MULO Brands
For multi-location brands and the agencies that serve them, maintaining consistent AI and local search visibility at scale is a resource problem, but AI agents are beginning to solve it. Managing local SEO across hundreds of locations means doing the same things you’d do for one location, including optimizing listings, responding to reviews, publishing posts, […]
AI Search Is Rewriting Local SEO for Multi-Location Brands
Local search visibility has been one of the most stable areas of SEO for years, relying on conventional techniques like keyword matching and search positioning. However, search behavior is now changing due to the implementation of AI-generated answers. Users are expecting synthesized suggestions for local businesses rather than sifting through a list of options. The […]
The Agency Offering Your Clients Need: Citation Intelligence for AI Search
Most local SEO agencies have a citation management offering of some kind. They might audit client listings, fix NAP inconsistencies, claim the obvious missing directories, and report back to the client. This process gets the job done as a basic optimization to check off, but it was designed for improving traditional local rankings — not […]
America’s Most Music-Obsessed Cities Reveal a Hyperlocal Shift Brands Are Missing
New data suggests America’s deepest music engagement is happening far from the country’s largest media markets, creating new implications for brands, agencies, and local media companies trying to understand consumer intent and hyperlocal audience engagement. If asked to name America’s most music-obsessed cities, most marketers would probably start with New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, or […]
The Website Is No Longer the Center of Local Discovery
For years, multi-location brands built local marketing around a fairly simple model. A customer searched, clicked a result, visited the website, and made a decision from there. Visibility was measured through rankings and traffic. Persuasion was expected to happen on the site. Performance was judged largely by what could be tracked after the click. That […]
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