How badly have marketers been hit by the pandemic? More than half – 55% — reported a budget cut, according to this Chief Marketer study. The marketing mix is also changing, with growth in social media, content marketing, influencer marketing, and email. Losers include search marketing, referrals, and, of course, live events.
I guess there’s some irony in talking about location tracking at a time when much of the country is rarely leaving home. But the pandemic shall pass and when it does, marketers will be eager to connect the dots between advertising and in-store customer behaviors. Which brings us to this announcement that location-based ad and attribution vendor Reveal Mobile is partnering with Tapad, which will help them to measure retail foot traffic and target store visitors (and their households) across devices.
In more quotidian news, Mailchimp has purchased AI platform Inspector 6, which analyzes marketing content, looks at its performance, and suggests improvements. The target is small businesses that lack human staff to do such things. But if you human marketers aren’t looking over your shoulder, you should start.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.