Yelp reviews are a foundation for many SMB marketing programs, so it’s on-topic today. But their actual news is a man-bites-dog reversal: Yelp has just launched two ad units that let national brands promote themselves by highlighting local companies that carry their goods. Sponsored Collections show ads organized around a theme while Seasonal Spotlight ads present a rotating sample of brand holiday campaigns.
We don’t write much about SMB (Small and Mid-size Business) products. But now that I’ve raised the subject, SMB payments and communications platform Podium has raised a $201 million Series D, bringing total funding to $419 million. Podium started as a review-generation platform, but its ability to accept payments within text messages is what’s unusual.
Amazon, which has amassed a vast amount of sensitive information on customers and whose efforts have gone largely unchecked, has now been shown, via confidential documents reviewed by Reuters, to be running a big lobbying effort used to forestall or gut privacy legislation. The effort, led by a former aid to President Biden, has killed or undermined privacy legislation two dozen states.
Bombora has launched Visitor Insights, a consent-based website tag that tracks the topics a device has consumed. It infers intent, job function, management level, and other information that B2B publishers can use for ad targeting and personalization. This Bombora report shows intent trends by industry: for example, media and advertising users show 70% more interest in Customer Data Platforms than they did last year.