News and Analysis
WeFranch Hits the Road in 2025 With a Team of Franchise “Stars”
The franchise space has become more complex and dynamic in recent years. A key part of the MULO (multi-location) landscape, it has its own subject matter experts, consultants, ecosystem, investors, and owners. One of the topics we’ll be delving into at Street Fight LIVE 2025 is the ever-evolving role of franchisors and franchisees in scaling, […]
Places Scout Acquired: Yext’s AI-Driven Future
Yext is rapidly redefining digital presence management through a strategic combination of AI-driven automation, competitive intelligence, and omnichannel customer engagement. The company’s latest acquisition of Places Scout, alongside its earlier purchase of Hearsay Systems and the launch of AI Review Generation, solidifies its position as a leader in helping multi-location businesses optimize visibility, outperform competitors, […]
Monday Morning Quarterbacking: Super Bowl Ad Review
If we didn’t do our gameplay replay of Super Bowl ad trends, we would be derelict as business media covering the media landscape. At $7-8M for a 30-second spot, big brands (and well-funded scaling brands) continue investing in this aspect of their media mixes. That’s a hefty spend, and unless it’s tied to other media […]
Commentary
Level Up Your Customer Experience with Unified Touch Points
When it’s deployed strategically, technology can augment CX in both virtual and in-person settings. The key is for retailers to align their business models around excellent customer service to avoid introducing friction into the customer journey.
How Balanced Is Your 2023 Marketing Portfolio?
As you finalize your 2023 strategy, keep in mind that you’ll need to balance your media investments like a financial portfolio — a strong position in performance marketing requires an offset in brand and demand building and vice versa.
Navigating Economic Uncertainty: Follow the Ad Spend Trends and Stay Flexible
2022 continued the (sometimes unpleasant) pattern of being an unprecedented year in many ways for the advertising industry. As a result, here are a few considerations that marketers, publishers, and agencies should pay close attention to in 2023.
Latest Posts
Geofencing: How to Leverage Location-based Ads
Geofencing is one of the most underutilized paid media strategies. Marketers in any vertical can use targeted location-based ads to serve personalized creative and messaging to the right audience, whether that user is on the other side of the globe or walking by the front door. What Is Geofencing? Geofencing is delivering digital ads based […]
BOOM: Pets are a Profitable Priority for MULO Brands
Consumers are spending on their “fur babies” these days in record numbers! Viewed as members of many families, dogs, cats, birds, guinea pigs, and even rabbits and snakes compel shoppers to take out their wallets to feed, tend to, and even dress their beloved animals. The market size for the the pets care segment was […]
Real Talk About Advertising ROI: Focusing on Fundamentals
Advertising isn’t an exact science: at best, advertisers might be able to establish cause and effect between a particular campaign and ROI, but the why of why a campaign succeeded or failed is often a mystery. Agencies and their clients will often have to move from quantitative analysis (each dollar spent translated to X amount […]
Survey: Despite Data Privacy Fears, Consumers Eagerly Embrace AI to Save Money
Consumers are leery of many things, but artificial intelligence doesn’t appear to be one of them. That’s according to a new survey by UserTesting, which found that despite concerns over data privacy — and a general uneasiness about brands using their personal information without consent — the majority of Americans are eager to embrace AI […]
Yelp Launches Index to Combat Deceptive Reviews
With fraudulent reviews on the rise, Yelp is making a change. Since 2012, Yelp has placed more than 4,900 Compensated Activity Alerts and Suspicious Activity Alerts, but for consumers, it can be difficult — if not impossible — to tell which businesses are bad actors on the platform. Now, in an effort to combat the […]
Locality Says Start Your Election Spending
Election season will be here before you know it, and TV remains the star platform for political campaign media spending. According to AdImpact, political ad spending is projected to reach upwards of $10 billion in media spending, with TV (broadcast, cable, streaming, etc.) on track to rake in half of that number. Locality, a TV-advertising […]
Arity and Tapestri Drive2Earn Partnership to Revolutionize Data Sharing
A strategic partnership between Arity, a leading data and analytics company, and Tapestri, an app that rewards users for sharing their data, has the potential to transform the way millions of drivers perceive and harness the value of their own location data. Together, the two firms are launching Drive2Earn, a new feature available in the […]
BUST: A Hard Landing as Soft Surroundings Files for Bankruptcy
Here we go again…another beloved retailer shutters its brick-and-mortar operations. Soft Surroundings filed for bankruptcy this week. This MULO (multi-location) women’s clothing brand once had 80 locations physical locations (reduced to 44) and is now shuttering all of them. The company, which released its first catalog in 1999, also sold home goods and accessories. However, […]
Captify, Adform Partnership Creates First End-to-End Contextual Activation
A new partnership between the search intelligence firm Captify and Adform, a programmatic platform, is creating an industry-first end-to-end contextual activation that bypasses the need for cookie identifiers. The collaboration between the Captify and Adform enables privacy-first, audience-based programmatic buying for marketers, opening the door to greater scale across inventory pathways, which are often deprioritized […]
Touchdown! How MULO Brands Score During Football Season
Many retailers and restaurants already have their eyes on the December holidays and are filling the shelves with pumpkin spice everything and costumes. We understand that huge MULO (multi-location) chains have planned their inventory and marketing campaigns months in advance. Advertising, licensing deals, and other NFL football properties add a whopping $5B to the U.S. […]
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