News and Analysis
Walmart Credits In-Person Retail for Its Growth, and It’s Not Alone
Walmart’s Q3 earnings call revealed something interesting: Walmart places much of its recent revenue growth and success on in-person shopping. “In-store volumes grew, pickup from store grew faster, and delivery from store grew even faster than that,” the company wrote about its U.S. locations. The growth of in-store shopping in an era of e-commerce accessibility […]
The MULO Dozen: December in Review
What a year we had! MULO (multi-location) retailers, restaurants, and service businesses have BOOMed and BUSTed, the C-suites have seen many changes, and consumers continue to shop, research, and spend both in-store and online. They are compelled to find places and products via local search, as well as by social media pundits, retail ad networks, […]
Later Acquires Mavely for $250M. The Creator Economy is Here to Stay!
Later announced today the acquisition of Mavely for $250M, creating a creator powerhouse. Later is an enterprise-level influencer marketing and social media management software platform. Mavely is an app for the “everyday influencer” who earns commissions on sales. Later’s AI predictive analytics will now leverage first-party performance data from Mavely’s network of more than 120,000 creators […]
Commentary
CDPs Can Deliver Bottom-Line Results — If Used as Intended
A CDP won’t necessarily replace as many tools in the business’ tech stack as some business leaders might hope. We need to understand a CDP’s real capabilities and set reasonable expectations for their overall utility.
The Telltale Signs of Fake Reviews
Curtis Boyd is the founder of a Southern California-based company, The Transparency Co, which has gained significant attention in recent months for the technology Boyd has developed to detect fake reviews at scale. Boyd’s company has recently secured government contracts to help ferret out fake reviews online.
Ecommerce Design: How Smart UI Choices Boost Engagement and Conversion
In ecommerce, conversions are considered the most important metric to track. However, an increase in engagement can matter just as much: the more people interact with your pages, the more likely they are to return and convert later as well as to promote your business among their own network.
Latest Posts
Survey Reveals Why Customers Delete Branded Apps
The number one reason consumers delete branded apps is to free up phone storage space. According to a survey from Airship and Sapio Research, 32% percent of respondents cited space as the top reason. In-app ads, if multitudinous, were cited as the second highest reason people deleted branded apps (30% of respondents). Sapio Research and […]
GroundTruth CMO: ‘Most Brand Marketers Struggle with Marketing Vanity Metrics’
The role of a marketer changed drastically in 2023. Rather than being centered on brand, advertising, and digital marketing, brand marketers today are focusing more heavily on strategic areas, like marketing analytics, revenue growth, innovation, and market entry strategy. Surveys show that while firms are slowing their investments in customer relationship management systems, brand building, […]
Hair Care Today…$41B Tomorrow: The Growth of a Category
Hair care is a rapidly-growing category for multi-location brands. As part of our future-forward series, we’ll cover categories that are on the upswing in the MULO (multi-location) ecosystem, along with trends that will impact individual brands’ survival and growth. Intellectual capital has value, but what’s ON our heads can be as lucrative as what’s in […]
Social Marketing Gets Redefined in the Era of AI
In an era where everyone is trying to get more done in less time, generative AI has become a valuable tool for social marketing professionals. According to a new survey from Sprout Social, conducted by the digital insights firm Cint, 71% of social media marketers have already started using AI and machine learning tools, and […]
The Taco War Rages On
Publicity stunt or legal battle? Or, perhaps, a little of both. In case you’ve been too busy over the past week to track the battle antics. Here’s a brief summary. Taco John’s trademarked the term “Taco Tuesday” back in 1989. Taco Bell is now taking legal action to invalidate the trademark so all taco-selling brands […]
Billionaire Steve Kuhn Finds New Use for Empty Retail Spaces
What’s that new use? You guessed it…pickleball! But financier and Major League Pickleball founder Steve Kuhn called his new multi-location brand Picklemall. Taking full advantage of large empty spaces in shopping malls, the company will launch its first indoor pickleball concept in Arizona Mills in Tempe in July 2023. It expects to open 50 locations […]
Amperity Getting Ahead of Cookieless Targeting
Google’s plan to eradicate the third-party cookie is still on track for 2024, but it is starting slowly, turning off just 1% of these tracking pieces of code in Chrome in Q1. Other companies are already taking similar steps to wean their measurement systems to prepare for cookieless targeting, and Amperity is no exception. The […]
5 Brands Using QR Codes to Drive Traffic to Online Platforms
The predictions were correct. QR codes are back — in a big way. After debuting in the 1990s, then losing relevance in the early 2000s, QR codes came roaring back to life in 2020. Now, three years after QR codes re-entered the mainstream during the Covid-19 pandemic, some of the biggest brands in the world […]
Seedtag Launches Next-Gen AI Solution
Global contextual ad company Seedtag has launched a next-gen AI powered context platform that gives brands and agencies the ability to create tailored creative ads that fit the context of the page on which they are featured. Dubbed “Liz,” the platform uses deep learning, computer vision, and natural language processing to create insight-driven prompts from […]
The Power of DOOH in an Omnichannel Media Strategy
To the layperson, out-of-home advertising means nothing but billboards that litter the landscape and ads on taxi tops or elsewhere that their eyes randomly scan. Even some sectors of the marketing industry do not give much thought to DOOH advertising or digital-out-of-home advertising. But these media channels are much more strategic and powerful than many […]
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