News and Analysis

Scooter’s Coffee Growth and the Future of Franchise Marketing

Scooter’s Coffee Growth and the Future of Franchise Marketing

As multi-location brands push deeper into expansion mode, one of the biggest operational challenges is no longer simply opening new locations. It is maintaining consistent customer engagement, local visibility, and brand standards across hundreds of markets simultaneously. Scooter’s Coffee is increasingly confronting that reality firsthand. The rapidly growing drive-thru coffee chain, Scooter’s Coffee,  has expanded […]

Why Programmatic Audio Is Winning New Attention From Advertisers

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 […]

SOCi Hits 300,000 AI Agents as Automation Goes Mainstream

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 […]

Commentary

“Why Aren’t We in ChatGPT?”: The New Question an Agency Must Answer

“Why Aren’t We in ChatGPT?”: The New Question Agencies Must Answer

A new question is starting to surface in agency client calls: “Why aren’t we showing up in ChatGPT?” At some point recently, you’ve probably gotten this call. A client — one with solid Google Maps rankings, an optimized Google Business Profile, and a steady stream of reviews — asks ChatGPT or Gemini to recommend a […]

Why AI Is Forcing Marketing to Move From Channels to Intent

Why AI Is Forcing Marketing to Move From Channels to Intent

For decades, marketing teams organized their strategies around channels—search, social, email, and paid—each measured and optimized separately. But as AI increasingly mediates how buyers discover, compare, and choose products, that channel-based model is breaking down, forcing marketers to rethink their infrastructure around something far more important: customer intent. That channel-based structure shaped everything from budgets […]

The Missing Piece in Multi-Location Marketing: Location-Level Attribution

The Missing Piece in Multi-Location Marketing: Location-Level Attribution

Multi-location marketing has become dramatically more sophisticated over the past decade. Brands now operate across dozens or hundreds of markets, running paid search, local SEO, social campaigns, listings management, and reputation programs simultaneously. But while marketing execution has scaled, measurement often hasn’t kept up. Multi-location brands often rely on dashboards that show total leads, conversions, […]

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How Digital PR Shapes What AI Says About Multi-Location Brands

How Digital PR Shapes AI Visibility for MULO Brands

AI platforms aren’t just a gateway to websites. They are narrators, deciding which brands are mentioned, how those brands are described, and which attributes are emphasized when recommendations are generated. For multi-location organizations (MULOs), this is important because search performance at the local level is no longer limited to whether a specific location ranks in […]

Kevel Integrates With Adobe to Enable Real-Time Retail Media Activation

Kevel Integrates With Adobe to Enable Real-Time Retail Media Activation

Kevel has launched a native Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) Destination that enables retailers, marketplaces, and commerce media platforms to activate first-party audience data in real time for retail media campaigns. The new integration creates a direct streaming connection between Adobe Experience Platform and Kevel’s ad server infrastructure, allowing customer segments to update instantly at the […]

How Community-Focused Messaging Drives Loyalty for Multi-Location Brands

How Community-Focused Messaging Drives Loyalty for Multi-Location Brands

There’s a reason the phrase “shop local” continues to resonate. For multi-location brands and the agencies that support them, it’s not just about geographic proximity — it’s about relevance, trust, and shared identity. Consumers don’t build loyalty because a brand is loud. They build loyalty because it feels connected to their community and reflective of […]

AI Is Reshaping Even Direct Mail — And Home Services Brands Are Taking Notice

AI Is Reshaping Even Direct Mail — And Home Services Brands Are Taking Notice

As AI continues to transform digital marketing, it is now reaching one of advertising’s oldest channels: direct mail. Imaginuity has launched AI Mail, a managed direct mail system designed specifically for home services brands. Powered by AdScience®, the company’s proprietary Customer Data & Activation Platform, the offering applies machine learning to identify high-probability households and […]

New Scorpion Report Signals Growing Performance Gap in the Home Services Economy

New Report Signals Growing Performance Gap in the Home Services Economy

A new national study from Scorpion suggests that local home services businesses are entering 2026 facing a widening performance gap — one shaped by rising homeowner expectations, AI-driven discovery behavior, and fragmented marketing infrastructure. Scorpion’s 2026 State of Home Services Marketing Report, based on responses from 2,000 homeowners and nearly 1,000 home services business leaders, […]

Select Enterprise Local SEO Has a Visibility Problem — And AI Search Is Making It Worse Enterprise Local SEO Has a Visibility Problem — And AI Search Is Making It Worse

Enterprise Local SEO Has a Visibility Problem — And AI Search Is Making It Worse

Enterprise brands and multi-location businesses are investing more than ever in local SEO. Bigger budgets. Advanced tools. Experienced in-house teams and agency partners. Yet many multi-location brands are still missing a critical piece of the puzzle: true visibility at the location level. The culprit isn’t execution. It’s measurement — or more precisely, the lack of […]

Seedtag and IRIS.TV Bring Program-Level AI Targeting to Connected TV

Seedtag and IRIS.TV Bring Program-Level AI Targeting to Connected TV

Seedtag and IRIS.TV have formed a partnership to expand privacy-first neuro-contextual targeting in connected TV (CTV). The integration brings IRIS.TV’s program-level content signals into Seedtag’s AI engine, Liz, to improve contextual precision, scale, and transparency for advertisers. The collaboration focuses on strengthening program- and scene-level targeting in CTV without relying on identity-based signals. By combining […]

Guideline Bets on an AI Factory to Reinvent Media Planning - Guidline

Guideline Bets on an “AI Factory” to Reinvent Media Planning

Guideline has unveiled a major expansion of its artificial intelligence strategy with the launch of the Guideline AI Factory, an internal innovation engine designed to accelerate how AI powers its ad intelligence data products and media plan management (MPM) technologies. The initiative marks a shift from standalone analytics capabilities toward embedded intelligence that directly supports […]

TikTok Channel Partner Program Scaling Short-Form Video Campaigns

TikTok Is Becoming a Core Marketing Channel — Not Just a Social App

TikTok, once known purely for bite-sized content and entertainment, has evolved into a place people go to discover brands, learn what’s trending, and make decisions. With over 1 billion monthly active users globally and 200 million in the U.S.1, it’s become where someone might first hear about a product, look up a service, or decide […]

Study Finds Rewards Drive Bigger Baskets - and Brand Switching

Study Finds Rewards Drive Bigger Baskets – and Brand Switching

A new 2026 study from XCCommerce found that 46.8% of shoppers buy more than planned or switch brands when redeeming rewards. The data suggests promotions are no longer just loyalty tools. They actively drive incremental spend, especially when offers are simple, timely, and delivered through owned channels like email and text. StreetFight spoke with XCCommerce […]