2024 is shaping up to be the year of the AI-powered shopping assistant. Just two months in, retailers from Walmart and Amazon to Ikea and Chevron have released a flurry of AI-based updates, hoping to make the shopping experience easier and more relevant. Here are some notable examples. Search party: Walmart kicked things off at the Consumer Eectronics Show, unveiling its generative AI search tool that allows shoppers to search by specific use cases, like 'football watch party,' instead o...

Consumers cherish loyalty programs, and they like the personalized emails that promote them. But many receive too many irrelevant messages, judging by the 2024 Consumer Trends Index study from Marigold, which was conducted in conjunction with Econsultancy. Of the U.S. shoppers polled, 78% will pay more to buy from the brands they are loyal to, up from 72% in the prior year. Email outperforms social media, but just barely. Overall, 51% of consumers have made a purchase from an email in...

Generative AI is beginning to transform marketing and advertising — and brand managers are scrambling to keep up with the onslaught. Eighty-two percent of marketers are familiar with generative AI tools and 65 percent have incorporated them into their tech stack, according to the "The Highs, Lows, and 'Whoas' of AI," which surveyed 317 marketing professionals. Yet many marketers are having a tough time leveraging the full potential of AI: 70 percent say they feel inundated by the current p...

Think about the best advertisement you've ever seen. I'm willing to bet it was your favorite because it made you laugh; and unless you're the sophisticated type, maybe it was even a little stupid. If you ask me, the best work always is. It's human. It's also the secret to outlasting AI. We might not be able to outsmart it, but we can dig deep into our innate human sensibilities. In some ways, AI is a saving grace. It's been a godsend for Photoshop comps. It can be our get-out-of-jail free-ca...

Brands are pouring money into data, and getting increasingly astute about how to use it, judging by Demystifying the Data Layer: Transformation of Marketing Data Infrastructure," a white paper released Wednesday by Winterberry Group. This year alone, $27 billion will be spent on data in the U.S., data services and infrastructure -- and that total is expected to rise by 8% to $33 billion by 2027, according to the report. In 2024, that investment will support $270 billion in U.S. media...

Implementing AI is sort of like welcoming a puppy into your house, a puppy that never grows up and needs constant oversight (not to mention potty training). Your AI tools need constant maintenance and oversight to perform as expected. There's a good reason for this. When you ask Bard, OpenAI or Anthropic chat questions, the tool tends just to take whatever data it can justify as a credible source within the large language model (LLM), run it through a GPT and output something humans recogni...

Almost all consumers like coupons. And they will do several things to receive them, including signing up for emails, according to Coupons, Discounts & Bogos Oh my! A study from ActiveCampaign, conducted by Ascend2. Of the shoppers polled, 77% prefer email as the channel for receiving ecommerce coupons, although 31% like SMS and 17% prefer social media. At 90%, people in the Boomer+ category are most likely to like email, versus 81% of Gen X, 72% of Millennials and 70% of Gen Z. ...

Last year was not a good year for direct mail in the US, as volumes and spend plummeted. But SMBs in the US and Canada haven't abandoned printed marketing materials, with 58% of marketers surveyed at SMBs planning to increase their use of printed marketing materials, and 43% expecting to expand their use of direct mail. That's according to a recent report from Ascend2 and Allegra. The results are based on an August 2023 survey of 441 marketing and sales decision-makers at small and mid-sized bu...

It has begun. Gmail is temporarily rejecting messages that fail its new authentication rules. There are many more stages before the requirements take full effect. Here is the schedule: February 2024: Regardless of volume, all senders must comply with the general email-sending practices outlined in the guidelines. February 2024: Bulk email senders must start implementing enhanced requirements, including email authentication. April 2024: Messages that are not compliant will start...

Direct mail continues to bea strong channel for marketers with plenty of associated spending. But after a couple of years of growth, direct mail volumes tanked last year, as did marketers' investment in the channel, according to a Winterberry Group report. In fact, direct mail volumes dropped by 13.4% last year to under 63 (62.94) billion, with the year-over-year decline of almost 10 billion pieces marking 'the largest pullback since the 2009 recession,' per the analysis. The decline com...