Tag: retail

Christmas Comes Early With On-demand Local Services

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: VentureBeat

This holiday season, Banana Republic is in a giving mood, partnering up with not one, not two, but four local services. The national retailer is providing its customers with free credits for services on Shyp, Deliv, Curb, and TaskRabbit. The best part? No purchase is required to receive these perks; you just need to walk into a Banana Republic store.

With such generous offers, the company aims to make the holiday shopping a little easier for its customers, while giving the local services a boost. And when shopping is made easier, shoppers naturally tend to shop more. It is a win-win-win solution for all parties involved, and that’s why more retailers, especially the brick-and-mortar ones, should get closer to on-demand local services.

Online Black Friday Sales Breaks $1.5B As Physical Retail Slides

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: TechCrunch

It looks like online sales got off to a good start in the U.S., with Thanksgiving topping $1 billion and Black Friday passing $1.5 billion — respectively, a growth of 32% and 26% over 2013, according to early numbers from comScore. As online retailers use Cyber Monday to extend the post-Thanksgiving holiday sales rush, further growth in Ecommerce is expected this holiday season.

The good news for online sales, however, might come at the expense of subpar brick-and-mortar performance, as sales across physical stores for the past four days are down 11% to $50.9 billion from year-ago $57.4 billion, based on a new National Retail Federation report.

Twitter Enters Brick-and-Mortar Retail With “Offers”

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Re/code

After experimenting with several ecommerce features, today Twitter is officially entering brick-and-mortar retail with Twitter Offers, a new feature that allows users to claim discounts right from a brand’s promoted tweets by linking their credit or debit card account with Twitter. Users can then redeem the discount simply by paying with the linked card in the retailer’s store.

As of now, Twitter is only charging brands for the promoted tweets. If this type of digital coupon catches on, Twitter could start charging retailers a fee for every offer claimed or redeemed. If anything, Twitter Offers would certainly provide physical retailers with a new way to measure the impact of online promotions.

Meet Our Newest Partner, Estimote, The Beacon Management Solution

Posted on by Lab Team

Read more on: Estimote Team Blog

Estimote just announced a new array of software that includes developer SDKs, APIs, and other tools to help developers and retailers alike deploy and manage beacons at scale. IPG Media Lab signed on as one of the marquee launch partners (and so far, is the only media company on board) because we are very excited about the innovative approach that Estimote takes with its open APIs, which allow beacon data to be integrated into existing enterprise software systems. We’re particularly excited to see this amazing new platform start gaining grounds in the hyperlocal market.

Walmart Matches Price With Amazon To Combat Showrooming

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Gizmodo

The growing power of ecommerce is bleeding into brick-and-mortar retail. Walmart has reportedly informed managers of its roughly 5,000 stores across the US that they can match prices with Amazon.com and other online retailers.  As 21% of US respondents use a smartphone to research online in their purchase journey, according to Google’s consumer barometer, we expect more practices like this to be formalized in retail stores to combat the showrooming effect.

 

Walmart To Challenge Chromecast and Roku with Vudu

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: The Verge

Walmart is ready to compete with the likes of Chromecast and Roku in the increasingly saturated market of streaming dongles. The “Vudu Spark” will be launched this coming holiday season to help push Vudu—the Walmart-owned video streaming service—and Vudu only, into more living rooms. With such limited functionality, the massive retailer may need to set a competitive price to be a true contender.

 

Lowe’s Introduces Beacon-Sensing Robot For Customer Service

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Wall Street Journal

Lowe’s department store has started testing a new connected device program called OSHbots that provides customer service with a robotic assistant. The robots use beacon technology to know what aisle the customers are in and where to go. This also allows the robots to provide inventory support to the store, as well as to display location-specific ads or promos. With more connected devices being implemented in retail, customer experience inside physical stores are about to change forever.

Event Recap: IoT Meetup #12 Was All About Beacons

Posted on by Lab Team

At Monday’s Internet of Things Meetup #12 at the Cardozo Law School, it was All About Beacons. (That was the title of the event, seriously!) The buzzy Bluetooth LTE technology has been making waves in the ad tech space and in the media. Like all cool new tech, beacons inspire heated rhetoric: are they the holy grail of advertising, or just the latest fad? Do they spell the end of privacy for consumers, or is it usual media alarmism?

The IoT meetup tried to settle the hype. Beacons are, as Sharat Potharaju of MobStac explained, “simply a transmitter with a Bluetooth LTE protocol.” The idea behind beacons is by partnering with an app, one can detect location within 40 feet and implement “hyperlocal” communication. NewAer’s Dave Mathews (of CueCat and Slingbox infamy) was a second speaker. His platform, which he likens to an IFTTT for the real world, is a flexible deployment of beacons that can communicate with any device, and thus an app’s API.

That’s a big deal in the spaces like retail — step into a storefront, know your customers. But it has implication for everything from museums to hotels, and that’s why the Cardozo room was packed with developers, journalists, marketers and just plain tech geeks, just trying to understand why Bluetooth was suddenly hot again.

Find Out Where Amazon Is Opening Two More Pop-ups

Posted on by Lab Team

Source: LA Times

Following last week’s announcement of its first-ever brick-and-mortar store in Midtown Manhattan, Amazon is now planning pop-up stores in San Francisco and Sacramento, California, next week for the holiday shopping season. Different than the supposed “warehouse function” of its NYC store, these two pop-up stores will reportedly carry Amazon-branded e-readers, tablets, smartphones, and streaming media players to provide customers with an opportunity to try out its own lineup.

AdWeek Event Recaps Masterpost

Posted on by Lab Team

Over the last four days, The Lab attended and covered six NY AdWeek events in total, and here is a round-up. Click on the titles to read more.

Programmatic Sophistication: Riding the Next Wave of Innovation

The IPG Media Lab kicked off Advertising Week bright and early on Monday, attending a panel on the future of programmatic featuring Matt Seiler, the Global CEO IPG Mediabrands; Vivek Shah, CEO and Chairman, IAB; Neil Vogel, CEO, About.com; and Tim Cadogan, CEO, OpenX; and moderated by Alex Kantrowitz of Ad Age.

What Is Newsworthy?

On Monday, Michael Roth, the Chairman & CEO of IPG, moderated an Advertising Week panel with Rebecca Blumenstein, Deputy Editor-in-Chief, Wall Street Journal; David Pemsel, Deputy Chief Executive, The Guardian; Pete Cashmore, CEO & Founder, Mashable; and Greg Coleman, President, Buzzfeed; in which they discussed the future of the news and advertising’s role.

The Future Of Measurement

CBS’ Chief Research Officer David Poltrack, CMO of AOL Advertising Erika Nardini, and IPG Mediabrands’ Global CEO Matt Seiler came together this morning to talk about the future of audience measurement in a hyper-connected, multi-platform world. Representing the three key facets of the market (media companies, digital advertisers, and agencies, respectively), the three panelists debated shifting consumer behaviors and how the industry is adapting to such changes.

Future. Video 3.0

As part of our continuing Advertising Week coverage, this morning we attended a discussion on breakthroughs in audience targeting in cross-platform video advertising. Moderated by Scott Donaton, Global Chief Content Officer & Head of UM Studios, the panelists consisted of Bryan Gernert, CEO of Resonate; Jamie King, CPO of Keek; Andrew Snyder, Video Sales VP of Yahoo; and Matt Van Houten, Ad Sales Director of AT&T Adworks.

Proximity Marketing and Its Future

Continuing our coverage of New York Ad Week, today the Lab attended “Proximity Marketing, Wearables, and the Art of the Possible”, focusing on disruptive technologies and their impact on customer experience marketing. Led by Moderator Andrea Fishman from PwC, the panelists consisted of Fishman’s colleague David Clarke; Andrew Markowitz, Global Digital Strategy Director, GE; Mark Donovan, Chief Operating Officer, Thinaire; and Jordan Grossman, US Head of Sales at Waze.

Reimagine Retail for the Connected Shopper

“Reimagine Retail for the Connected Shopper” is the second Ad Week seminar we attended earlier today. Presented solely by Michael Dill, Managing Partner of Match Marketing Group, the seminar explored the various facets that today’s digitally connected shoppers are reshaping the retail market.