Snap has taken the latest step in its mapping evolution. As part of its broader revenue diversification play, Snap Map has rolled out new loyalty badges. By gamifying local business engagement, Snap is hoping to boost map usage, offline foot traffic, and ultimately monetization via Promoted Places.
Advertising is a logical monetization path for AI search. Like traditional search, user intent is spelled out… but even more so, given nuanced natural-language queries. This is the idea behind OpenAI’s new ad program. And though it’s experiencing early growing pains, it’s quickly muscling past them.
How has local media and advertising changed most over the past 25 years? It’s a heck of a lot more fragmented, says Joe Naylor. Now an advisor at 19Y Advisors, Naylor is a credible witness on this topic, given two decades in local media sales for giants such as Cox Media Group and EW Scripps.
SMB marketing software leader vcita has announced the launch of an AI-powered lead conversion tool. Known as AI Leads Max, it sits under vcita’s flagship inTandem platform and automates the cultivation of inbound leads. This is an opportune area of SMB SaaS that AI continues to transform.
As the AI market grows into adolescence, its players are finding opportunity in specialized segments. And in emerging tech, that often involves verticalization. That’s where AI is now, such as OpenAI’s recent expansion into healthcare. And that’s what Anthropic is now doing in its latest move into law.
TikTok continues to pursue an unlikely distribution channel for its content: billboards. It’s calling this “out of phone” media… a variation on the digital out of home (DOOH) category that houses billboards and digital displays in public spaces. And its latest move in this realm is to partner with Vistar Media.
SOCi has just announced that its locally-deployed AI marketing Genius Agents have exceeded 300,000 in number. This makes it the largest-deployed agentic workforce, having grown 350 percent in the past year alone, and on pace to execute more than 20 million marketing tasks annually.
hat can one middle-America city tell us about trends in local advertising and marketing? This is a question we posed to Houston Chronicle’s SVP of Advertising Ryan Kedzierski at L26. According to Kedzierski, it’s hard out there for local publishers given media fragmentation, but there are bright spots.
Google I/O is underway and it’s a parade of new products and features. And as you can imagine, everything has an AI label on it and is infused with Gemini, Nano-Banana, and other Google AI variants.
Google has announced that it’s reformatting some of its AI Overview results to accentuate experts and the wisdom of the crowds. This notably puts Reddit front and center in terms of an authoritative source of knowledge for granular natural language queries, which are the active ingredient in AI search.
One of the giants of the AI world has drawn a direct line between its platform and small businesses. Anthropic, the new king of enterprise AI, announced that it will roll out an SMB-centric variant of its flagship AI engine. Known as Claude for Small Business, it’s a suite for typical SMB needs.
Within the broader trend towards democratization of tech and media for SMBs, the barriers for TV and video ads have dropped dramatically. SMBs have always wanted their own TV ads, but it’s been out of their reach. So what has changed?
TikTok announced yesterday that there’s a new use case on the viral video app: booking your next vacation. The thought is that you can learn about new places and activities organically on TikTok – as is the normal course of things – then turn that inspiration into action with transactional functionality.
Yelp’s Q1 earnings showed flat revenue growth and other marginal gains, but it beat estimates given a challenged SMB macroeconomic environment. Its earnings also tell a compelling story about non-advertising revenues and – like several others we’ve been watching – revenue diversification.
In Snap’s Q1 earnings call on Wednesday, it pointed to SMBs as a growing source of revenue for its advertising and promotional products.
Google continues to add functionality to AI Mode. The latest enticing offer is the ability for users to ask the AI engine about availability of nearby products, including what’s currently in stock. This brings a longstanding functional aspiration for Google together with its latest AI-focused and buzzy products.
With the rise of AI engines comes the need to learn the still-opaque and quickly-developing art of AI optimization (AIO), also known as generative engine optimization (GEO). Just when you mastered SEO, this comes along.
Doordash has announced a new suite of tools designed to onboard SMBs to its platform in streamlined and automated ways. Highlighting things like pre-populating their business details, menus, and other relevant info, the endgame is to attract more SMBs to the platform by lowering friction.
The biggest bombshell to recently hit the advertising world – a world already facing increased competition and fragmentation – is the entrance OpenAI. Its ad infusions in ChatGPT are slowly rolling out, and the headline has been the program’s growing pains. But are those pains being alleviated?
Snap has been on a clear revenue diversification path over the past few years. Branching out from its core business in ad revenue, it has launched subscription products such as Snapchat+. And with a subscription revenue run rate of $1 billion, that plan appears to be working, and gaining Wall Street favor.
