Location Weekly: Using Location Data to Track Covid-19
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Turkish firm Elektral developing vending machine for masks, wipes, and disinfectants; UNL raising $2M for smart address system; Wuhan bringing its famous Cherry Blossoms online; and Israeli startup Noveto bringing “smart audio bubbles” to digital signage. The episode also features a special discussion on using location data to track the virus.
4 Mobile and Location Trends for Brands to Keep an Eye On
Believe it or not, this is the smartphone’s third decade. When it comes to mobile apps and location-based marketing, so much has changed since the advent of the iPhone in 2007.
While it’s hard to predict what will become of mobile and location-based media in the next 10 years, it’s fair to prognosticate what we can expect for the rest of this year and beyond. Here are four mobile and location trends brand marketers need to watch.
Freckle, AdSquare Team Up on Privacy-Compliant Geo-Contextual Advertising
For years, geo-contextual advertising focused on targeting consumers for specific products or services at specific locations. The strategy has delivered impressive results for many brands and agencies. But with privacy restrictions on the rise, the time has come to start reimagining geo-contextual advertising in a way that brings brands together with on-the-go consumers in a privacy-safe way.
While many vendors are looking at how to expand into privacy-safe geo-targeting, Freckle and AdSquare are getting out ahead of the pack. Just this morning, Freckle and AdSquare announced a collaborative effort to improve geo-targeting capabilities for brands and agencies across North America. Through the collaboration, Freckle will layer its privacy-safe visitation data into AdSquare’s platform.
Three Ways to Solve for Foot Traffic Attribution
What most ad platforms cannot tell you is how your ads drove foot traffic to stores and other physical locations you care about. If driving foot traffic to retail locations is your job, Google Ads and other digital ad dashboards can’t help you. When in-store foot traffic attribution is crucial, how do you solve for it?
In this article, we cover three ways to solve for attribution, ranging in difficulty from easy to hard. We look into easy options that are inexpensive but tend to be unreliable. We evaluate a medium option that has a moderate cost but is highly reliable and bypasses human error. And lastly, we look at a hard option that incorporates several tools and, while highly reliable, comes at a high cost and is difficult to scale.
Location Weekly: FCC Fines Location Data Purveyors; Adidas Taps WhatsApp for Mobile Marketing
In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers the FCC proposing hefty fines on mobile operators for selling location data, Apple turning your photo into a car key, Adidas tapping WhatsApp to reach consumers, KFC Canada integrating Google Maps and Assistant, Uber offering car-top signage for new driver revenue, and JCDecaux leveraging facial recognition for Yoplait in Australia.
Survey: What Marketers Want from Location Data
Marketers surveyed showed an especially keen interest in understanding how they can integrate location data with other kinds of information. Asked how they deploy location data, 27% said it’s a “key component of a broader strategy to map the customer journey online and offline.” Twenty-six percent, the second-largest segment, said they were interested in learning how to marshal location data in conjunction with other data to achieve more advanced goals than their current practices allow.
Three Methods to Deploy Foreground Data Effectively
For those of us in the location data industry, we must adapt to the new world we live in and find solutions to solve the age-old problems our clients face. Foreground data (data that is captured only when a user has an app open) has the potential to be just as effective and insightful and can offer even greater insights into how people interact in the physical world.
Companies conducting location analysis can use three methods to help keep their solutions robust in this next era of location data; layer in foreground apps, reduce noise, and capitalize on inferences.
Why and How Often Consumers Share Location Data
Location is among the types of data consumers are most likely to weigh disclosing based on the utility of the scenario. Asked about eight different types of data, including marital status, social security number, and physical address, a higher percentage of survey respondents said whether they’ll share location data “depends” on the situation than for any other category. It’s neither an automatic yes or no; companies need to make a case.
Mobile Marketing Firm Verve Acquired by Germany’s MGI
The companies underscored Verve’s location data-driven ability to drive prospective customers into brick-and-mortar stores, adding a cutting-edge ad tech capability to MGI’s suite of existing media solutions. Verve will also help the European enterprise increase its presence in North America.
Foot Traffic Data Shows Signs of Retail Apocalypse Can Speak to Smart Retail Strategy
Over the last year, we saw many well-known brands close their doors and scale back their offline footprints. While many believed this to be a sign of weakness, it was, in fact, a sign of a very effective corporate strategy.
Retailers such as Macy’s and Walmart both faced multiple closures in 2019, but when digging deeper and analyzing specific store locations, we uncover a much more informative narrative than simple brick-and-mortar decline.
With Investment in Geo, Foursquare Focuses on Improving Data Access
When it comes to location data specifically, Senior VP of Product Josh Cohen is seeing Foursquare’s partners put more emphasis on the quality of data. The company’s partners are developing more sophisticated understandings of the range of data quality when it comes to location, which means Foursquare has to dedicate more resources to make sure new industry-wide expectations are met.
Takeaways From ‘The Other CES 2020’ That Location-Minded Marketers Need to Know
CES provided a unique showcase for the importance of connected TV (CTV); it’s one of the few events that wrangles hardware, media, and advertising companies into the same place for a week. Within digital advertising, this topic is number one, and not outlining your strategy to support CTV in 2020 was a way to cut any CES meeting short. Companies that have moved from video to TV, such as Amobee or Telaria/Rubicon, exciting new combinations of TV and digital assets such as Xandr; programmatic TV leaders like The Trade Desk; and companies that have been long on TV for years such as Samba TV should have a fantastic 2020 ahead of them.
2020’s Location-Privacy Winter: The iOS Edition
CCPA isn’t the only factor that will impact privacy and data collection. There are less-discussed and potentially more significant variables like the death of browser cookies and other tech-centric measures. Especially for location tracking, private sector influences and accelerants loom.
This Year, Brands Will Seek Out Incrementality
As networks, publishers, and agencies continue to shift to guarantee business outcomes in ad deals (a trend that began earlier in 2019), the concept of “incrementality” will emerge as a key issue for marketers in 2020.
Advertisers today have an incredibly difficult time distinguishing between those exposed to ads who were already going to visit the store (the natural effect, driven by intent and brand identity) vs. those who visited because of that exposure (the incremental effect, driven by ad sensitivity). Quite understandably, we want to know if our advertising campaigns actually work in changing consumer behavior in our favor.
January Focus: Pursuing Privacy
As we straddle the precipice of a new year and a new decade, the next milestone in privacy legislation looms: the California Consumer Privacy Act. As California’s version of GDPR, it is the first major US privacy legislation. It will set a precedent and kick-start a domino effect for other states and may even lead to federal data privacy moves.
“Pursuing privacy” will be Street Fight’s editorial focus for the month of January. You may have noticed our monthly themes: December focused on the connected consumer, November’s focused on holiday shopping, October on local commerce verticals, and September on mapping (more on those in a bit).
Heard on the Street, Episode 41: Tracking Real-World Intelligence, with Blis
One of the most consequential topics to emerge in local commerce in 2019 (and our upcoming editorial focus for the month of January) is the location-based ad industry’s looming privacy winter. Due to regulations like CCPA, as well as privacy restrictions at the mobile OS level, the bar will be raised for collecting location and movement data.
That could likewise raise barriers to entry in location-intelligence and even lead to a market shakeout, considering the abundance of companies that have entered the space in the past few years. One of the longstanding players that will vie for market share is London-based Blis.
Heard on the Street, Episode 40: Building Location Intelligence, with GroundTruth
The location intelligence sector has gotten crowded in the past five years, making it harder and harder to stand out from the crowd. Making matters more difficult, there are looming restrictions such as location tracking in iOS13 and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). These factors could raise barriers to entry and cause an industry shakeout where only the strongest survive.
On the list of longstanding industry players with extensive networks and location intelligence chops is GroundTruth. As we discuss with CEO Sunil Kumar on the latest episode of Heard on the Street, succeeding in location requires concrete and verifiable data for foot traffic.
Making the Case for Driver-Centric Location Solutions in Cars of the Future
Traditionally, a lot of discussion around location tech as it relates to auto is for marketing and media applications for the dealerships and automakers themselves, where the goal is to sell more cars. That helps the OEM and the dealers, but it leaves an enormous opportunity on the table. We also need to be customer-centric, which means providing an experience that decommoditizes ownership and makes the journey itself a little more interesting. That’s how to keep the miles-traveled metric high, even when fewer cars are being sold.
Applying user data in this fashion requires adherence to a code of data privacy and ethics — starting with a clear and obvious value exchange to the end user (the driver). An owner of a vehicle should clearly understand the benefit in having location data collected. Location data can improve the driver’s experience in three ways.
Back-to-School Retailing Is Now All About Using Mobile Data to Help Your Customers
Back to School (BTS) is a $53 billion shopping season that’s entering its final stage as parents and college students take care of school supplies and clothing needs before Labor Day. And as we close out this decade and look to the 2020s, the combination of mobile technology, hyperlocal commerce, and consumer expectations make this a fascinating juncture in BTS history.
Fortunately, these complex market scenarios represent more of a golden opportunity than a paradox due to the promise of mobile. Here are two reasons why national and local brands should leverage data to bridge the online-offline gap and improve their BTS sales.
Amid COVID-19 Pandemic, Accurate Location Data Can Save Hassles and Even Lives
Updating your location data management information to reflect new hours, store closures, different contact information or special announcements is important for business success in general. In the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic, maintaining accurate location data can actually have vital consequences for public health.
Yet a BrandMuscle study found that less than 60% of local business owners had even claimed their online business listings, which can lead to confusion about whether businesses are open or not.