We’ve passed the six-month mark of living through a global pandemic. I’m not sure it’s an anniversary worth celebrating – it’s more of a ‘day-that-will-live-in-infamy’ type. In the retail world and working with consumer-facing brands, we’ve observed that many with a direct-to-consumer orientation have fared well. In contrast, the broader spectrum of the retail and consumer services sector has not. I’ll try to be as diplomatic as possible here – if there’s one thing Americans don’t like, it’s being told what to do. We tend to think of ourselves, our families, and our immediate communities – and probably in that order – as the best sources of information. State and federal guidelines tend to (at least initially) be met with resistance, especially when those guidelines affect one’s ability to earn a living, visit with family and loved ones, or eat a meal indoors at a restaurant. What the pandemic has revealed is simple: culture matters. Congregating limitations and business closure edicts, and the delay in loosening them, have put our culture on ice. Although, not entirely. read more at: https://cohereone.com/the-pandemic-matters-of-culture-and-why-direct-to-consumer-brands-are-thriving/

Google confirmed Thursday to MediaPost that it ran a limited experiment with a handful of publishers serving ads in chatbots before making AdSense for Search (AFS) broadly available to sites that host conversational AI interfaces earlier this year. AFS has been a long-standing product that allows publishers to show ads on relevant queries within the search results on a publisher’s page. The AdSense network was traditionally used to place ads in search results and across websites. Now it is running ads in chatbot interactions.

The debate over the balance between short- and long-term marketing can get a little tiresome. But at its heart is an inescapable truth that has been given too little attention: People who may be in-market for your product at some point in the future, may not be in-market for your product today. In fact, 95% of the buying universe for your product are not shopping for you now. Only 5% are. In the mattress category, there are 134 million potential buyers in the U.S. That’s the ice cream -- the universe of people who will, one day, buy a mattress. On average they will be in the market every seven to 10 years. Right now, though, only about 14 million people are in any kind of conversation about mattresses. And a little less than 54,000 of them are ready to buy a mattress. Clearly, 54,000 is a small piece of a 134 million person pie. But here's the rub, as with all categories, the mattress business is experiencing hyper-competition. There are 600 national brands in the mattress category now. All 600 of them are fighting tooth and nail to win their share of those 54,000 sales. But there’s a compound problem: just two of those companies account for 45% of all mattress sales in the category. So, the other 598 are now fighting tooth-and-nail for their share of 30,000 sales.