Geofencing, Customer Experience Helping Physical Retailers Compete Digitally

Online retail numbers may have been way up around Thanksgiving this year, but brick-and-mortar retailers aren't out of the game yet. Prioritizing customer experience and geofencing, retailers are trying to make in-store visits more relevant than ever, and mobile's helping them compete there. AR's also set to be a larger part of future customer experiences as well, especially as Snapchat angles to lead the way there. If the AR-focused differenatior wasn't enough for you, how about a porg to hang out with you anywhere (while promoting the new "Star Wars" film)?Your full rundown of mobile and online video ad industry happenings are below. See anything else we need to know about? Let us know.Here’s How Geofencing Helps Brick-and-Mortar Stores Compete in an Increasingly Digital World [Adweek]Forced to step up their game by online sellers offering convenience, brick-and-mortar stores can’t be outdone when it comes to the human element. One of the major reasons that in-store shopping is still very much alive is down to the retailer’s commitment to improving the customer experience. And one of the most powerful tools they’re using to do this is geofencing.‘AR is the Next Internet: Snapchat Gets $1 Mil. Per Day for Branded Lenses [Digiday]“We justify our ad spend [on 3-D lenses] because we see millions of people often use the lens and share it with their friends. People are 100 percent engaged with the brand — that type of engagement is valuable,” said the New York-based executive. “But most clients haven’t bought into the idea that everyone needs an AR lens yet. After all, those lenses don’t drive sales.”PSA: Snapchat Has a ‘Star Wars’ Porg [Mashable]Snapchat has been pushing for this type of ad as it tries to convince advertisers and investors that it gets fun and impactful creative more than other social media platforms. “I think art has always played with this concept of reality ... and so I think it’s very exciting now that technology is playing a much bigger role in art," Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said in a recent interview with The Guardian.Tales From the Ads.txt Trenches [AdExchanger]What we’ve taken away from the experience is that Ads.txt is a great solution to the problem of spoofed domains. What we’ve also discovered is that it’s subject to a wide variety of missteps on the implementation side, and these missteps can slip through multiple hands unless verification is done on the demand side.WTF is Ads.cert? [Digiday]Ads.txt verifies that a business is authorized to sell a publisher’s inventory, giving the publisher more control and assuring buyers they’re only buying from authorized sellers. Ads.cert goes a step further and validates the information that passes between buyer and seller at each stage of the digital ad supply chain, ensuring it’s not vulnerable to being modified or gamed. It’s like a digital signature that lets buyers verify a specific site’s inventory, and it stops fraudsters from tampering with the inventory.‘Absurd’: Angry Advertisers Slam YouTube’s Response to its Brand Safety Snafus [Business Insider]While AT&T said it was working with YouTube's top leadership and hoped to return by 2018's first quarter, it is far from being the only brand that is still holding out. Several big name brands, including Priceline, Kimberly-Clark, Squarespace and Casper have steered clear of the platform since March, according to data from ad analytics platform MediaRadar.TV Viewing on Social Media to Triple by 2027 [Advanced Television]A report from UK TV Licensing shows a rising trend in people watching live TV via social media, as audiences predict a sharp increase in how many of them will be viewing live TV on sites like Facebook and Twitter in the next 10 years. At present, around eight per cent of UK adults say they have watched live TV on a social media platform, with the number predicted to rise to 27 per cent over the next decade. A fifth see themselves watching more live TV on short-form social apps, such as Snapchat and Instagram, while 35 per cent say they expect to watch TV shows integrated with Virtual Reality in the near future.To Stop Ad-Fraud Bots Like Hyphbot, Brands Need to Give Media Buyers Amnesty [VentureBeat]Once brands have a realistic media plan, it’s time to start protecting the actual media budget before it gets wasted through spoofing, middlemen, and black-box arbitrage. The beauty of new technologies and solutions like ads.txt and blockchain are that they can actually enforce change, not just inform it. Viewability reporting is nice, but solutions like ads.txt, blockchain, and pre-bid data from WhiteOps actually stop money from going out the door into the wrong hands.  Twitter Will Now Display View Counts for All Videos, Including Ads [MarketingLand]Viewability threshold: Twitter counts a view once the video has played for at least two seconds while at least 50 percent is in view, in accordance with the Media Rating Council’s video viewability standard. By comparison, Facebook and Instagram count a view three seconds after a video has played, and YouTube typically counts it once 30 seconds or half of a video has played, whichever comes first. Wattpad: ‘Campaigns Work When They Feel as Native as Possible’ [AdExchanger]Metrics like viewability, impressions and clicks are implied when users are reading a series of branded stories to completion and asking for more, he said. Beyond sponsorships and branded content opportunities, Wattpad offers more traditional advertising options, including in-story ads and brief videos interspersed within stories, as well as basic targeting options mainly based on gender, age, geo and context.Should Media Buyers Resist the Whitelist? [ExchangeWire]Mashable Reeling in its Video Ambitions Since ZiffDavis Sale [Digiday]News Corp. Unveils Brand-Safe Premium Ad Platform [MediaPost]‘We Had to Pull All of Our Ads Off YouTube’: Marketers Sound Off on Brand Safety [Digiday]YouTubers Made Hundreds of Thousands Off of Disturbing Child Content [Buzzfeed]Snowden’s Favorite Ad Blocker Can Now Automatically Detect New Tracking Scripts [Motherboard]A Brief History of Internet Display Advertising -- And the People That Hate It [MediaPost]