News and Analysis
Retailers Unpack Black Friday Spending Data
Criteo analyzed commerce data from 1,005 retailers in the U.S. and 216 million transactions in the fourth quarter of 2020. In the process, they found that sales in the first three weeks of November were up 7% year-over-year in the U.S., indicating that Black Friday sales may have been down 5% because those purchases happened earlier this year than previously.
Adtech Firms Test New Concept with Autonomous Bot Delivery Campaign
While food delivery platforms like Postmates, DoorDash, and GrubHub have all launched no-contact options, they generally rely on human drivers leaving food on the ground outside people’s front doors. With the health risks and potential for mix-ups, it’s less than ideal.
A better solution might be the one being rolled out by Wrapify. Just this morning, the company announched the launch of a first-of-its-kind campaign that could take autonomous bot delivery to the next level.
Street Fight’s December Theme: Leaving 2020
What will the “next normal” look like in the post-Covid era of local commerce? Will things go back to the old normal or be a hybrid reality that cherry-picks components and new perspectives from the past nine months? Will e-commerce dip back down to pre-Covid levels or keep surging?
We’ll be answering these questions and others throughout the month, along with 2021 predictions (’tis the season) for our theme, Leaving 2020.
Commentary
Will Apple Help Assemble the ‘Internet of Places’?
The AR cloud is the missing piece in the vision we all have for how AR should work. It’s the spatial map of the world that will let AR devices understand their surroundings. Taking this into account, the news that Apple is collecting its own data for Apple Maps may have implications for AR.
Latest Posts
TownNews’s ‘iQ Engage’ Sorts Through Signals to Help Publishers Keep Users Reading
TownNews.com has come up with a way for local publishers to cut their bounce rates — and the happy result is longer sessions and more click-throughs to advertising messages. That means more monetization for publishers and, ultimately, more users-turned-into-consumers buying products and services.
Frustration With Digital Marketing Vendors Boils Over for One SMB
If it’s possible to distill the 30 million small business owners in the U.S. into a single persona, Marc Reisner strikes our columnists as a great candidate: “Marc has been disillusioned by past performance and that poor performance has understandably tarred the entire industry with the same brush.”
7 Ways That Brands Can Make Chatbot Conversations More Authentic
Chatbots are transforming the customer experience and quickly moving into new sectors — but before marketers can expect conversation-mimicking software and artificial intelligence to replace live customer service representatives, they’ll need to find ways to overcome some consumer obstacles.
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