What Political Campaigns Can Teach Marketers About Hyperlocal Media Strategy
Political advertising has long served as a testing ground for innovations that eventually make their way into mainstream marketing. Campaigns operate under compressed timelines, face relentless pressure to prove effectiveness, and often have only a single opportunity to influence behavior before Election Day. As a result, many of the strategies developed in political media—from audience […]
Yext Wants to Be the Infrastructure Layer for Agentic Marketing
For most of the last decade, local marketing technology was built around helping brands rank in search engines. That model is beginning to change as AI-powered search experiences, agentic marketing, recommendation engines, and conversational assistants play a larger role in how consumers discover and evaluate businesses. According to Yext’s recent Consumer Search Behaviors report, 28% […]
Basis and Cint Want Brand Metrics to Matter Before Campaigns End
Digital advertising has long operated with two separate measurement systems. On one side sit performance metrics such as clicks, conversions, cost per acquisition (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS). These indicators provide near real-time visibility into campaign activity and allow marketers to optimize media while campaigns are running. On the other side are brand […]
The Goddard School Is Changing How Franchise Marketing Gets Done
Growth creates a unique challenge for franchise organizations. Every new location expands revenue opportunities, but it also adds complexity. More locations mean more local marketing channels to manage, more reviews to monitor, more business listings to maintain, and more customer interactions that require attention. At a certain point, growth itself begins to change how marketing […]
What Yelp’s Fastest-Growing Brands Reveal About Consumer Behavior
Every year, lists of the fastest-growing brands offer more than a snapshot of corporate success. They provide insight into what consumers increasingly value, how preferences are evolving, and where demand is moving next. Yelp’s 2026 Fastest-Growing Brands report does exactly that. Based on growth in consumer engagement across the Yelp platform, the rankings highlight brands […]
Why MULO Brands Are Investing More in Creator-Led Marketing
Creator-led marketing is rapidly evolving from an experimental tactic into a core component of many brands’ growth strategies. As consumers spend more time with creator-generated content and place greater trust in peer recommendations than traditional advertising, marketers are increasingly turning to creators as a scalable channel for customer acquisition, engagement, and brand building. The trend […]
Why the World Cup Is Really Thousands of Local Marketing Moments
The biggest mistake brands make when approaching the FIFA World Cup is treating it as a single media event for local marketing. In reality, the tournament is thousands of simultaneous local moments unfolding across cities, neighborhoods, bars, restaurants, transit hubs, streaming platforms, and cultural communities. For agencies, media companies, and multi-location brands, that distinction may […]
Nielsen and Mediaocean Bring Advanced Audiences Into Linear TV’s Core Workflow
For years, advanced audience targeting has been one of the biggest promises in TV advertising. The challenge has never been defining sophisticated audience segments—it has been carrying those audiences consistently from planning and buying through measurement and reporting. That is the problem Nielsen and Mediaocean are now attempting to solve. The companies announced a new […]
Walmart and Magnite Signal Retail Media’s Next Phase
Walmart’s new partnership with Magnite may signal a broader shift in how retail media networks operate. Rather than requiring advertisers to work within retailer-controlled ecosystems, companies are increasingly looking to make their first-party data available across the platforms agencies already use. For multi-location brands and agencies, the move points toward a more interoperable future for […]
Why MULOs Need a Localized Unstructured Citation Strategy
Citation management for multi-location businesses has long been a structured affair, consisting of claiming listings for each location, ensuring NAP data is up to date and consistent across those listings, and repeating for every location in the portfolio. These types of structured citations still matter for local SEO, but with the advent of AI-powered search, […]
What the FBI’s DOOH Strategy Teaches Marketers
Digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising has traditionally been viewed as a channel for building brand awareness, driving store visits, and influencing purchase decisions. But one of its longest-running use cases highlights a different strength: its ability to generate real-world action quickly and at scale. The Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) recently announced the […]
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 […]
AI Is a Multiplier: Why Better Data Drives Better Results
For too long, the conversation around AI has centered on capability. What it can do. What it might unlock. But capability without underlying quality will only scale the wrong things. AI amplifies the marketing data that’s already there. Done right, it accelerates insight, boosts creativity, and enables rewarding collaboration. Done wrong, it amplifies risk, bias, […]
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 […]
Broadcast Is Losing Ad Dollars Despite Massive Reach
The advertising industry has spent a decade solving for targeting. Most of the major platforms have gotten quite good at it. That is not where broadcast is losing. Broadcast is losing on proof. The buyers moving budgets to Netflix, Amazon, and programmatic platforms aren’t doing it because those platforms have bigger audiences. In most markets, […]
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 […]
OOH Pushes Deeper Into Performance Media
OOH advertising has long benefited from its physical presence in the real world. But as marketers increasingly demand the same level of attribution, interoperability, and performance accountability they expect from digital channels, the industry is racing to modernize how the medium is measured. That effort is now accelerating through a new initiative led by the […]
AI Agents Are Reshaping SEO for MULO Brands
For multi-location brands and the agencies that serve them, maintaining consistent AI and local search visibility at scale is a resource problem, but AI agents are beginning to solve it. Managing local SEO across hundreds of locations means doing the same things you’d do for one location, including optimizing listings, responding to reviews, publishing posts, […]
AI Search Is Rewriting Local SEO for Multi-Location Brands
Local search visibility has been one of the most stable areas of SEO for years, relying on conventional techniques like keyword matching and search positioning. However, search behavior is now changing due to the implementation of AI-generated answers. Users are expecting synthesized suggestions for local businesses rather than sifting through a list of options. The […]
Google’s New AI Search Rules Create a Challenge for MULO Brands
Google recently published its first official guide to optimizing websites for generative AI Search features. For single-location businesses, the guidance is fairly straightforward. For multi-location brands (MULOs), the same principles apply, but the complexity of executing them scales dramatically with every location you add. Here’s what the guide says, and what it actually means if you’re […]