“I was just being selfish. I wanted a way to talk to people who understood what I was doing — which is the entire ethos of community.” “A lot of people feel isolated and wonder why they can’t find someone that gets them — and you can find that online in the right places.”

The first comment came from Mike Rizzo, telling me how the MO Pros community of marketing operations professionals started out as a Slack channel. The second came from Melanie Aronson, founder of Panion, a community engagement platform. Community. The latest shiny object or something brands need to put on their roadmap?

Sarah Cascone, Senior Director of Marketing at Bluecore, sees community as being especially valuable in the B2B space. “A B2B company doesn’t have the same emotional attachment for a customer as say a brand or retailer, where the product or mission of the company is part of the customer’s lifestyle. So when you create a passionate community behind what a B2B company stands for, I think that’s when it really gets interesting – because it’s no longer about the product.”

“Community is tremendously important moving forward for businesses,” said Rizzo. “Community as a function of business and a function of practice has been a long time coming. It’s just maturing. You need the technology to enable these things.”

Read more here. »

People shop in stores and on websites that recognize them and welcome them back. They like offers that match their interests and are delighted by great experiences. Sometimes they want to be fully known, at other times, they want their privacy maintained. To make this happen brands must constantly keep track of the known and pseudonymous information about people. This process requires identity. It should be the core of your madtech stack.

Read More »

Global information company TransUnion has announced the launch of TruAudience, a new suite of data solutions for marketers. The launch represents the culmination of acquisitions and partnerships by TransUnion in recent years, making the company a significant presence in the adtech landscape, especially in streaming video.

As part of the launch, Tru Optik (which TransUnion acquired last year) becomes the TruAudience Data Marketplace. Streaming media advertisers can use the marketplace to access audience segments through a myriad of partners, including Kantar, Comscore, Lotame, IHS Market and NCSolutions. 

Another part of the new suite is the TruAudience Platform, which includes a proprietary identity graph and enables marketers to use multikey matching and machine learning to onboard first-party data while also modeling audiences for campaigns. The third major piece is TruAudience Identity, which promises three-dimensional, omnichannel views of individuals, devices and households.

Why we care. Audiences are now cutting the cord and taking up streaming options for their TV needs. What marketers now see is a mass market of TV watchers that can be reached through digital channels to be served addressable ads and cross-channel messaging. But many consumers are also still cautious about privacy, so brands require the most tech-forward platforms and identity solutions to ensure that their campaigns are privacy compliant.

Taking advantage of intelligent data from TransUnion and their partners (much in the way Experian has also mobilized anonymized financial data with an identity solution) requires a broad network of adtech players. As a result, TruAudience aims to deliver insights into 98% of U.S. adults and over 127 million households, according to the company.

Read more here. »

There are many ways to use social and media data to inform your marketing decisions. But the most successful brands depend on data-driven insights to shed light on their overall brand health, analyze trends, anticipate consumer behavior and monitor the competition to ultimately grow their revenue. Join experts from Netbase Quid, who unveil how brands like Tesla, Lululemon and Nike found the secret of social and media data success by applying these insights to their business strategy and programs for maximum impact.

There's still time to register! »

Afghan all-girl robotics team safely evacuated. It’s a relief to see a small piece of good news coming out of the Afghanistan situation. Along with some hundreds of journalists and other media workers, a five-girl robotics team (youngest member 14) has been safely evacuated from Afghanistan to Mexico. The team has won international robotics competitions “and started work in March on an open-source, low-cost ventilator as the coronavirus pandemic hit the war-torn nation.”

Is Amazon making a u-turn from digital? Amidst unconfirmed rumors that Amazon, having acquired brick and mortar Whole Foods, may be planning to create a chain of new-concept retail stores, The Atlantic’s Amanda Mull furnishes some interesting observations on how the shipping crisis might undermine online shopping.

Three key points:

• Free and, at best, fast shipping from Amazon Prime encourages consumers to make multiple individual purchases rather than bundle products together;
• The rocketing volume of online shopping over the last 18 months has pushed shipping infrastructure to a breaking point. “There is no clear way for the industry to keep up if demand continues to grow.”
• The biggest problem is the “last mile” of delivery, especially to remote customers.

Can Amazon, of all companies, be thinking that it makes more sense and is more cost-efficient to make people shop in-store rather than online? That’s unlikely to be the craziest story of 2021, but crazy it is.

Submit your Stackie today for the chance to earn industry-wide recognition, be featured by Scott Brinker in the live celebration at The MarTech Conference (online September 14-15), and earn exceptional bragging rights!

Learn more and submit here »

“Where I think agencies need to step up is that a lot of them are stuck there and not moving into the next phase of changing ways of working. For instance, making sure DE&I is infused into how you write a brief or how you approach your clients.” Devin O’Loughlin, Global Chief DE&I and Communications Manager, Rapp Worldwide