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.
The holy grail of SMB SaaS is to be an all-in-one (AIO) provider. Spanning several SMB functions – from marketing to operations – AIO providers can gain ARPU and lower churn. The latter happens as they’re embedded deep into critical operations such as payroll and point-of-sale payments.
InMarket recently published a sort of public-service announcement that spotlights best practices in marketing physical brick & mortar locations. And in doing so, it drew out a few common tactics that represent a new playbook in location marketing.
Vendasta’s AI workforce, consisting of several role-based agents, has been selected by Italian digital marketing powerhouse Italiaonline to power its 100,000+ SMB customers. The centerpiece of this integration is an AI agent known as MARiO, which fields inbound calls and turns them into new business.
Yelp this week announced its Spring product release. This comes every year with a treasure trove of updates across Yelp’s products and functions. This year’s theme is unsurprisingly AI – including user-facing features to find local businesses, and SMB-facing features for automated task completion.
One of the places AI is being integrated in local business marketing is responding to reviews. This was an example cited several times at Localogy’s L26. What’s the opportunity to do this? What are pitfalls? And who’s doing it right?
One of the biggest questions looming over the digital media sphere is the degree to which traditional SEO carries into the emerging art of AI SEO, or GEO. Though this is a moving target given the pace of AI market shifts, the answer appears to be that some, but not all, SEO primes the pump for AI SEO.
Amidst all the AI excitement, one reality check we continue to raise is how the technology is held back by trust issues. Yes, AI is effective and impressive… but that doesn’t mean much if users don’t trust it en masse. These AI trust issues were quantified this week by a new study from Yelp.
TikTok’s footprint just got bigger. The company has formed a partnership with marketing automation and CRM platform HubSpot, which puts TikTok marketing tools directly in front of marketers. This should help TikTok as a customer acquisition channel, while helping HubSpot expand its functionality.
As a sell-side advertising company, Magnite is in prime position to facilitate TV advertising. Then, last fall, it closed the loop on end-to-end video production and campaign activation by acquiring Streamer.ai.
Back in January, Yelp acquired Hatch for $300 million. One thing that jumped out was the pre-money valuation and purchase price. Given Hatch’s $25 million ARR, the purchase price reflected a 12x ARR multiple. This begged the question: Are Covid-era software multiples back? The answer is yes and no.
OpenAI is just a few months into its ad monetization program and still in early stages of feeling out the right models. This has naturally led to some backlash, or at least distaste from some brand advertisers. Though these growing pains are being felt, it’s likely that OpenAI will figure it out.
Like many platforms do when they get to a certain stage of usage and engagement, Ring has opened up the opportunity for apps to be developed – via public SDK – to reach all those users.
As AI takes over the world, there’s creeping recognition that it’s not a silver bullet. It excels in some areas of automating life and work, but not others. For Hiper Co-founder and president Melissa Telsrow, much of this boils down to a question of where human work carries an irreplaceable essence.
In the past few months, we’ve tracked a handful of local marketplaces apps that have established their presence on ChatGPT, including transactional functionality. That list so far includes Angi, booking.com, doordash, Expedia, Uber and Zillow.
To show rather than tell, we’ve tracked recent product launches and integrations meant to empower SMBs to do more with less – the holy grail for local businesses. These AI integrations span operational functions but have a few common threads, such as agentic task completion and automation.
Google’s latest fusion of AI – Search Live – is now available publicly and globally. For those unfamiliar, this is Google’s multimodal-AI play that lets users combine visual, conversational text, and voice to prompt Gemini.
In this edition of Localogy’s Local Radar, we look at recently-funded startups Fuse, Sequen, and Atomic… plus a check-in with perennial Local Radar favorite, Harvey.
Wordpress.com this week became the latest player to add prompt-driven website creation and development. Meant to simplify website building to a conversational UX, it will let users speak commands to direct the automatic (excuse the pun) creation of WordPress staples like pages and posts.
