Let’s look at some location-related items. Here’s a new self-service platform for location-based advertising from GroundTruth, which says it sees two-thirds of U.S. smartphone users. Just sign up, register a credit card, and start targeting ads to people near a specific location. Lots of possibilities here. I wonder if they take payment in rubles?
Artificial intelligence has become so common that it barely registers as a product differentiator. That must be frustrating to AI pioneers. If the folks at TinyClues are feeling that pain, they’ve eased it a bit with a $18 million Series B investment in their system, which uses retailers’ first party data to choose the best product for each individual in email, mobile push, direct mail, and Facebook campaigns. The company says its clients have increased campaign revenue by an average of 49%.
The opposite of people-based marketing is content marketing, which markets to anyone interested in a particular topic even if you don’t know their identity. If privacy regulations and other changes make identification harder, you can expect content marketing to grow. That’s presumably the logic behind Sphere, Outbrain’s new, invitation-only network of publishers who will offer their content to each other’s audiences. It’s also positioned as a way for marketers to escape the walled gardens.
BrightEdge reports that, despite huge growth, AI search engines still provide less than 1% of website referral traffic. You might think that’s a reason to ignore your ranking in AI search engines, but BrightEdge argues those rankings are still important because the main role of AI search is discovery, not referrals. Seems like a testable hypothesis. What we know for certain is that over-all traffic has dropped as users switch from traffic-generating traditional search to traffic-stifling AI search engines.