News and Analysis

GumGum’s Grimace: The Ads that Stole Christmas Street Fight

GumGum’s Grimace: The Ads that Stole Christmas

Forget privacy issues. Re-targeted ads are in cahoots with the Grinch, stealing the joy of surprise from Christmas. Nobody can be blamed when opening up a gift and thinking, “Now where have I seen that before? Oh yes, ads for it were sprayed across all my social-media accounts and everywhere I went on the Web.” […]

BUST: The Party is Over for Party City Street Fight

BUST: The Party is Over for Party City

Although we’d love to keep things festive and bright this holiday season and report just on future trends and greatest hits of 2024, the sad reality is that some retailers can’t keep the lights on.  According to CNN, Party City is the latest retailer to announce that it is closing all its stores and going […]

ARound Uses AR To Bring Live Experiences to Life Street Fight

ARound Uses AR To Bring Live Events to Life

Imagine sitting in a stadium, watching your favorite sports team compete when suddenly the whole place is transformed into an Alaskan wilderness. That actually happened during a Rams game in SoFi Stadium earlier in the fall when ARound created one of its shared experiences. The augmented reality company owned by Stagwell, combines broadcast and mobile […]

Commentary

Identity is Table Stakes, But There’s More Than One Table

Since first-party cookies and login-based user targeting have now become key marketing elements, and new platforms are continuing to evolve and emerge, all marketers should be identifying people across multiple platforms — not just tracking various click patterns.

The Creator Economy Accelerates

Adobe’s annual Max event is happening this week in LA, its first physical rendition since Covid lockdowns sidelined the event world. Max is all about the creator economy, the emerging crop of individuals and SMBs that create content. This has been Adobe’s target market for two decades. This all manifests in the ever-growing Creative Cloud… […]

How Post-Pandemic Shopping Habits Affect Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Consumers aren’t holding off on gift purchases until the day after Thanksgiving. Retailers who’ve always counted on Black Friday in particular and the Cyber Five (Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday) in general to push them into profitability for the year need to develop new strategies based on data.

Latest Posts

Curb Wants Brand Enthusiasm for DOOH

Curb Wants Brand Enthusiasm for DOOH

Generating more than two billion impressions annually across 25,000 in-taxi media screens in most major DMAs, Curb (formerly Verifone Taxi Systems), a DOOH advertising and payment platform for car services, reaches “captive” audiences of millions. Its Taxi TV screens offer geotargeting, real-time RSS data integration, dayparting, and POI targeting to clients. Curb has been a […]

Hair Care for Men...Beyond Shaves and Haircuts

BOOM: Hair Care for Men…Beyond Shaves and Haircuts

Hair care post-pandemic is a rapidly-growing multi-location (MULO) category. As we reported recently, the industry was up 17 percent in 2022 and is expected to hit $41B by 2026. Women still spend more on hair care than men. They invest an average of $228 yearly on haircuts and $24 per month on hair products versus […]

Thumbtack, Scorpion Streamline Marketing for Home Services |

Thumbtack, Scorpion Partnership Streamlines Marketing for Home Services Pros

The digital martech provider Scorpion is partnering with the home management platform Thumbtack, in a first-of-its-kind integration announced just this week. With the deal in place, Thumbtack’s customer base of small business owners and solopreneurs working in the home services industry will be able to utilize Scorpion’s advertising and communications tools to get more leads […]

Simon Says "Your Product is In-Stock!" The Rise of Product Search Today and How MULO Brands Should Respond

Simon Says “Your Product is In-Stock!” The Rise of Product Search Today and How Brands Should Respond

Simon Property Group recently expanded its Simon Search technology, enabling mall-goers to determine if the brands they want are in-store,  before they head out to shop and spend. Product search before visiting a multi-location (or other) business is nothing new. Google reports that 74 percent of brick-and-mortar shoppers will do some online sleuthing before they […]

How Audio Advertising Became a Blindspot for U.S. Brands

How Audio Advertising Became a Blindspot for U.S. Brands

With the state of the U.S. economy still unclear, more advertisers are tightening their belts and re-evaluating their media mix. In a recent study by WARC, 96% of retail and CPG marketers said they’re evolving their advertising approach and tapping into digital audio advertising as a way to ensure a smooth path-to-purchase. According to Paul […]

Getting Your Local, Foreign ‘Phrase’ Just Right

Getting Your Local, Foreign ‘Phrase’ Just Right

Phrase is a global leader in enterprise localization software. The Phrase Localization Suite powers the entire localization ecosystem for global businesses, connecting, automating  and managing  high-quality localized content at speed and scale. The Phrase software can handle more than 500 languages, supporting 50+ file types and processing 2B+ words monthly. It has 200K global users. […]

We All Scream for Ice Cream (and retailers reply)

BOOM: We All Scream for Ice Cream (and retailers reply)

The summer is upon us, and many people are seeking ways to cool down. Although the old-fashioned neighborhood ice cream truck is a rarity, multi-location (MULO) ice cream and frozen dessert retailers show no sign of melting. Although the category has declined slightly from time to time, it still represents $5.5B in revenue in the […]

Ad-Media Companies Show Increased Interest in Data Privacy

Ad-Media Companies Show Increased Interest in Data Privacy

Move over, Metaverse. Take a nap, AI. Businesses in the ad-media marketing industry are taking an increasing interest in data privacy, according to the Bombora Upswell Report, which delves into the latest trends and developments across eight industries. According to the report, the interest in data privacy rose 70 percent among companies in the ad-media […]

Why Are Multi-Location Brands Ghosting Their Customers?

Why Are Multi-Location Brands Ghosting Their Customers?

You may have heard of ghosting in the dating or job application world. It’s when someone communicates with you and then vanishes suddenly and without a trace. Your messages go unanswered. Here today…ghost tomorrow! Multi-location brands (MULO) are ghosting their customers and prospects. A recent study by SOCI, “The High Cost of Invisibility for Multi-Location […]

On GDPR’s 5th Anniversary, Fragmentation Remains Biggest Privacy Challenge

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Although the privacy landscape is quite different in 2023 than it was five years ago, when the European Union’s GDPR went into effect in May of 2018, the adtech industry in the U.S. remains in a state of flux, struggling to deal with fragmentation caused […]