Category: Advertising & Marketing

Advertising & Marketing

Locafy Announces Enterprise Contract with Marketing &

PERTH, Australia, July 18, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Locafy Limited (Nasdaq: LCFY, LCFYW) (“Locafy” or the “Company”), a globally recognized software-as-a-service technology company specializing in local search engine marketing, announced today that it has signed a new enterprise contract with a leading integrated marketing and advertising agency for widespread deployment of the Company’s search engine marketing products.

Under this contract, Locafy technology will be integrated and deployed to this agency’s wide network of premium brands, including a collection of multi-national corporations. Through data-driven marketing solutions for digital and traditional advertising channels, this agency specializes in accelerating its brands growth and brand loyalty and has customers spanning several industries including health & wellness, retail ecommerce, hospitality & entertainment, B2B, education, and banking.

Locafy’s Keystone technology, one of the premium SEO products in Locafy’s arsenal, will be the staple products deployed as part of the contract. Keystone specializes in optimizing clients’ websites to enable clients to rapidly rank highly for competitive search keywords on a national scale. A series of successful trials over recent months demonstrated that Keystone can help clients advance negligible online presences to ranking nationally for industry-specific keywords in their respective countries, all within weeks of implementation.

“Developing our product offering and increasing our active customer and reseller counts remain important pillars of our growth strategy,” said Locafy Founder and CEO, Gavin Burnett. “We believe that as the volume of AI-generated content threatens many brands’ prominence in search rankings, Keystone helps our customers’ carefully curated and valuable content achieve and maintain excellent results. We have long been impressed with the growth that this agency has achieved across its client base, and are confident that our proprietary solutions will become useful tools for its growing network. We look forward to expanding our partnership in the coming quarters.”

For more information

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Advertising & Marketing

‘King’s Counsel’ titles may violate rules on misleading ads, experts caution

The head of Ontario’s legal regulator declined the government’s offer of a King’s Counsel designation due to the lack of selection criteria, she told the Star, as experts warn that using the title may violate professional conduct rules for lawyers.

Had Law Society of Ontario treasurer Jacqueline Horvat accepted the KC offer, she would have “risked giving credibility to a suspect government initiative,” said University of Ottawa law professor Amy Salyzyn, who specializes in legal ethics.

The Ford government has been staring down a patronage scandal for reviving the special title for lawyers last month and handing it out to numerous Tory politicians, staffers and loyalists. No public call for nominations, selection criteria, or information about the appointment process was made public prior to the announcement that 91 lawyers had received the designation.

The title carries no special privileges aside from allowing lawyers to put the initials “KC” next to their name and wear silk robes to court.

However, questions have been raised about whether recent recipients would be in breach of the Law Society’s rules of professional conduct around advertising, should they decide to market themselves as a KC.

Those rules caution against marketing awards, rankings and third-party endorsements that could be misleading to the public, including those that “do not genuinely reflect the performance of the lawyer and the quality of services provided by the lawyer but appear to do so,” and “are not the result of a reasonable evaluative process.”

Former Law Society treasurer Gavin MacKenzie told the Star that the recent batch of KC recipients, “with a few exceptions,” could fail to meet that criteria. He said it is “evident” that the list of recipients was largely based on party loyalty and not merit, and he also pointed to the lack of a public appointment process.

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Advertising & Marketing

Joy Marketing Benefits In Advertising & Branding Campaigns: Guide Released

PRESS RELEASE

Published July 11, 2023

London: Los Angeles (LO:LA) has released “Spread More Joy,” a primer introducing readers to the concept of joy marketing. In particular, the material answers the question “What does it mean to create joy with marketing?” and provides real-world examples of the use of joy in a number of successful creative campaigns.

More information is available at https://www.thelolaagency.com/2023/03/31/spread-more-joy/

“Marketing is not just about selling a product; it’s about creating an emotional connection with the consumer,” LO:LA said in the article. “When a brand creates joy and happiness, it’s creating an emotional connection with the consumer that goes beyond the product itself.”

For brands to accomplish this, LO:LA advised focusing on experiences instead of highlighting a product or service. It pointed to Airbnb’s “Live There” campaign as an example, stating that the campaign succeeded in making people excited about travel and, by extension, booking an Airbnb because of how the campaign presented travel as an activity that must be experienced.

Another method of adding joy to a campaign is by adding the element of “fun”. It pointed to Oreo’s “Daily Twist” campaign as one of the best examples of an ad campaign that generated massive buzz owing to it being “simple and fun”. “Whether it’s through humor, storytelling, positive messages, or experiences, brands have the power to create joy and make a difference in people’s lives,” LO:LA added.

While not as mainstream as other marketing disciplines, joy marketing now enjoys a growing number of advocates. For example, EXHIBITOR magazine called for more joy marketing during the tail-end of the pandemic, stating that brands should use the opportunity to engage with an audience that “has never needed joy more.”

LO:LA’s latest piece offered something similar, saying that amid hot-button issues like climate change and political polarization, joy

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Advertising & Marketing

How Will AI-Powered Ads Reshape The Market?

As an independent ad tech advisor, Ivan provides professional advice to the CEO and C-level management of the company SmartyAds Inc.

Almost all major platforms (Google, Facebook, Amazon) and independent programmatic ones currently employ smart algorithms for ad campaign optimization. Meanwhile, Google recently climbed upon a completely new level of AI implementation in ad tech by introducing generative AI tools that can already replicate the work of professional marketing agencies.

Ad tech giants are trying to outpace each other in the race for product advancements by introducing new predictive, creative-making, and efficiency-raising AI campaign tools. As the AI craze fuels the competition, it raises the bar for everyone in the industry—but what is the future of the independent ad tech sector in this, and is it going to keep up?

AI Advertising: Google And Fast-Growing Tech Take Lead

Some groundbreaking AI-powered advertising tools that Google recently introduced at the Marketing Live event are supposed to bring huge advancements in ad campaign creation and management. For instance:

• AI-powered campaigns in Google (P-Max) will be generated automatically, whereas previously, crafting ad banners or videos was impossible without writers and designers. The algorithms will simply source the advertiser’s website and marketing materials to generate customized creative assets that align with specific audiences and campaign objectives.

• AI-powered ads introduce an advanced campaign optimization feature. Google’s AI harnesses real-time data to meticulously adjust bids and targeting, enabling advertisers to achieve the highest possible return on their investments.

• As I previously mentioned, Chat GPT in ad tech has huge potential—direct chats and prompts could significantly streamline advertising operations. With Google conversational AI, users can edit and manage campaign creation via chat.

Google is not the only one currently exploring the soil of AI-driven innovations in ad tech. In an effort to

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Advertising & Marketing

6 campaigns that broke through the creative rut of H1 2023

Ad spending appears to be approaching some kind of normalcy with the digital boom of the pandemic tapering off and other channels reaching maturity. Yet, for brands, the moment in many ways feels as fraught as any period over the past three years, with splashy creative plays a rarity so far in 2023.

A sense of dullness means that a few big swings — in early applications of generative artificial intelligence (AI) or an over-the-top rebrand — felt more impactful over the past six months. But looking ahead to the second half, a posture of prudence is poised to endure as resources remain strapped and concerns over a divisive landscape lead to risk aversion.

Some CMOs are eyeing earned media as a cheaper, more efficient way to stay on the ball with fast-moving cultural discussions. The approach can pay dividends when timed well but also be deflating when a strategy meant to drive chatter fizzles or confuses. The right pick of celebrity ambassadors also continues to resonate with consumers. Look no further than soaring demand for names like Pete Davidson or Martha Stewart, the latter of whom helped animate campaigns from brands as varied as Tito’s, BIC and Oreo in the opening leg of the year.

Leveraging a famous face is a tried-and-true marketing tactic. Risk-taking, on the other hand, seems in short supply. Purposeful messages that once scored easy accolades and promised to make brand marketing a meaningful driver of societal change have become flashpoints for controversy due to the culture wars. Rather than weather the storm, many marketers have pumped the brakes to avoid becoming a political scapegoat in the vein of Bud Light.

Looming in the background, the rise of generative AI is poised to transform marketing, from the fundamentals of search to creative work. The

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Advertising & Marketing

Watching the detectives: Suspicious marketing claims for tools that spot AI-generated content

A common trope crossing the science fiction and mystery genres is a human detective paired with a robot. Think I, Robot, based on the novels of Isaac Asimov, or Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E., a show-within-a-show familiar to Friends fans. For our purposes, consider a short-lived TV series called Holmes & Yoyo, in which a detective and his android partner try to solve crimes despite Yoyo’s constant malfunctions. Let’s take from this example the principle – it’s elementary – that you can’t assume perfection from automated detection tools. Please keep that principle in mind when making or seeing claims that a tool can reliably detect if content is AI-generated.

In previous posts, we’ve identified concerns about the deceptive use of generative AI tools that allow for deepfakes and voice cloning and for manipulation-by-chatbot. Researchers and companies have been working for years on technological means to identify images, video, audio, or text as genuine, altered, or generated. This work includes developing tools that can add something to content before it is disseminated, such as authentication tools for genuine content and ways to “watermark” generated content.

Another method of separating the real from the fake is to use tools that apply to content after dissemination. In a 2022 report to Congress, we discussed some highly worthwhile research efforts to develop such detection tools for deepfakes, while also exploring their enduring limitations. These efforts are ongoing with respect to voice cloning and generated text as well, though, as we noted recently, detecting the latter is a particular challenge.

With the proliferation of widely available generative AI tools has come a commensurate rise in detection tools marketed as capable of identifying generated content. Some of these tools may work better than others. Some are free and some charge you for

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