🔊 Mobile is no longer just top of funnel

Last week, the cross-channel marketing platform Iterable announced the launch of Brand Affinity, a new cross-channel personalization tool with customer sentiment analysis at its core. In simple terms, by using AI to score customer sentiment, the solution allows brands to create sentiment-based segments which can be appropriately messaged at scale.

In 2020, like never before, marketers need to be sensitive to customer sentiment: lives have been disrupted, priorities have changed, purchase patterns have changed, and those consumers with spending power are shopping across an endless digital landscape, not just in the high street. Personalization solutions are widely offered, of course, but Brand Affinity places an emphasis on empathy.

We spoke with Iterable and Pega about their different approaches to meeting consumer needs in an empathetic way, and took the pulse of the sentiment analysis space from analyst Seth Grimes.

Read more here.

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Traditional media spending, including local TV, print, radio, out-of-home and direct mail, will be down between 15% and nearly 50% this year, depending on the medium. Some advertisers will never return, having shifted spending entirely to digital channels.

The decline of traditional, local media spending, however, doesn’t eliminate the need for a local marketing presence. Indeed, in some ways, the need for the trust and credibility that local media and marketing confer may be even greater now than in the recent past. Enter Field Day, which offers “last mile activation” and local field marketing to brands at scale.

According to CEO Alex Nocifera, Field Day is an “end to end solution for local sales and marketing activations” for multi-location brands. While one might expect the demand for local field marketing to have radically diminished during COVID, Nocifera told me that he’s seen increased demand because many of his customers “weren’t seeing conversions on digital; the time to market on TV and radio takes too long and ‘good OOH inventory’ wasn’t available.”

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Yesterday morning around 6:55am ET, a slew of Google services went offline, including Google Ads, Google AdSense, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google My Business, YouTube and more. Search, however, remained in operation during that time.

The downtime was short, but a quick look at the #googledown hashtag on Twitter shows just what kind of panic (and humor) the downtime caused.

Of course, downtimes happen. But Google isn’t DuckDuckGo.

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While 2021 still holds economic uncertainty, digital marketing leaders indicate that their agencies have been remarkably resilient, according to CallRail’s fall survey of 167 global marketing leaders who use its services. The findings show that most agencies will finish 2020 with higher annual revenues than in 2019.

Overall, agency leaders reported satisfaction across many different business areas, such as their talent and expertise, customer service and positioning. When asked about their ability to attain key growth metrics — like generating new client leads and closing new business — the majority of agencies also exhibited strong confidence that they can. While CallRail’s 2021 Outlook Report takes a much deeper dive into agency business practices, this article highlights some of the most interesting aspects of the research.

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In the nine days following this year’s Cyber Monday, mobile accounted for 39% of consumers’ online spending, up 57% year-over-year, and a far, far cry from the days when nine out of ten conversion journeys ended on desktop.

Interestingly, the average value of orders on mobile are still lower than on desktop, but that just might mean that there are still unexplored opportunities on mobile.

Overall, online shopping in the U.S. is up 48.8% YoY, and a myriad of factors have contributed to that growth, including the pandemic, improvements in site speeds, and streamlined checkout processes. With the Page Experience update rolling out next year, retailers may have to invest in their mobile web and app experiences as mobile commerce continues to grow.

Read more here.