Kohl's will seek social media buzz for holiday shopping season at Manhattan pop-up shop

Kohl's has no department stores in Manhattan — the closest is across the Hudson River in Jersey City — but the retailer sees value in strutting its stuff in the Big Apple for the holiday shopping season.

For the fourth year running, Kohl's will open a holiday pop-up shop in New York City, with this one aiming to build awareness of some of the merchant's new lines.

Occupying space at 632 Broadway, near Bleecker Street, the store will be open Nov. 7-10. Shoppers will be able to sip "mocktails" in the Outfit Bar space and step into "interactive holiday windows" showing off such new product launches as the Elizabeth and James line and the JW Jason Wu limited edition women's apparel collection, as well as existing brands like Scott Living and Simply Vera Vera Wang.

While Manhattan may not host any Kohl's stores, it's fertile ground for social media influencers who have become key components of retailers' marketing efforts. Events such as the coming pop-up are a way to show Kohl's items to influencers, Chief Marketing Officer Greg Revelle said in a statement.

"Engaging experiences like this provide a great backdrop for capturing and sharing social media-friendly content and to showcase our portfolio of new and existing brands," Revelle said.

Contact Rick Romell at (414) 224-2130 or rick.romell@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @RickRomell.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Kohl's will seek social media buzz for holiday shopping season at Manhattan pop-up shop

Google Analytics for brick-and-mortar: Observa helps physical retailers find their marketing edge

Observa takes home the literal and figurative big money after winning the the Economic Development for Central Oregon's 16th Annual Bend Venture Conference in October 2019. Pictured are co-founders Chief Technology Officer Erik Chelstad (left) and Hugh Holman, CEO. (Observa Photo)
As Amazon drives online sales skyward, a 4-year-old startup in the tech behemoth's backyard is helping brick-and-mortar retailers fine-tune their marketing.
This month Seattle-based Observa won the 16th Annual Bend Venture Conference, which was hosted by Economic Development for Central Oregon. The prize came with a check for $250,000 that is part of the company's current round of fundraising. Observa previously raised $1.3 million.
The company's revenue is up five-fold, year-over-year, said co-founder and CEO Hugh Holman. "We've found a product-market fit."
E-commerce "has trained us to understand the path to purchase for the consumer. You understand what they've seen and if that led to buying something," Holman said. "You don't know that in brick-and-mortar retail."
 It's like Google Analytics for brick-and-mortar.
Observa gives traditional businesses a similar insight into in-store marketing using an AI-powered platform. The company creates real-time, crowd-sourced retail audits that show brands and retailers how products are being displayed and correlating that with sales. "It's like Google Analytics for brick-and-mortar," Holman said.
Observa offers two main services. The startup provides crowdsourced retail audits in which people who have downloaded the company's app get a prompt to take photos of shelves displaying products owned by an Observa customer. The startup's AI-enabled software analyzes the uploaded images to determine how the items are displayed, and can compare that information to sales data. Retailers can also hire Observa to analyze product placements.
Observa also has a platform for field representatives to use when checking on brands and products.
Members of the Observa team in their Seattle office. (Observa Photo)
The crowdsourced folks shooting the photos are paid immediately and can earn a few dollars per gig. Observa customers are charged according to how many locations are surveyed, at a cost of about $8-to-12 per spot.
Holman said that new technology and sales services recently came online for the startup, allowing them to serve brands with a global reach, which drove their recent surge in growth.
Their top competitor is Trax Retail, which launched in 2010 and is based in Singapore.
Erik Chelstad is Observa's other co-founder and chief technology officer. The two have known each other for 20 years, and this is their first joint initiative. Holman most recently held leadership roles at the retail business Savers and the seafood company Aqua Star. Chelstad has worked in numerous tech roles, including the e-currency company BizX and the venture capital firm Arch Equity.
"In the end, the only thing that really matters is the consumer, and if you're not listening to the changing wants and needs of the consumer, then you'll go away as a retailer," Holman said. "The retailers who are listening are doing well, and we provide more information around that."
We caught up with Holman for this Startup Spotlight, a regular GeekWire feature. Continue reading for his answers to our questionnaire.
What does your company do? Observa is an AI platform that offers physical retail analytics similar to the online channel by using photos taken by people and machines. In the United States, brands spend $72 billion on in-store placement and promotion, and 72 percent of this spend is mismanaged at the store level resulting in brands realizing a negative return on their investment. Observa ensures that this spend is properly managed, resulting in an improved consumer shopping experience followed by sales improvements for the brands and retailers alike.
Inspiration hit us when: We were drinking a beer and looking at the taps. Seriously, we thought our first customers would be beer/liquor companies trying to measure the efficacy of their on-prem (in-bar) marketing efforts.
VC, Angel or Bootstrap: In the beginning, Observa was bootstrapped. We wanted to ensure that we had something of value before we reached out for investment and had tested with a few early clients. Once we had that, we tapped into the angel community. We're very thankful to the early investors who believed in Observa, as their funding enabled us to hire a staff and get the platform to the level it is at today. Now that we have several large clients as both consumer brands and even some retailers, we are really ready to take our product and services to the next level.
Observa co-founders Hugh Holman, CEO (left) and Chief Technology Officer Erik Chelstad. (Observa Photo)
Our 'secret sauce' is: Flexibility. Our AI platform works with any input, from peoples' cell phones to robots to drones to shelf cameras. Our reporting provides oodles of data that will make any local Tableau or Microsoft employee happy. We work with Microsoft BI, Salesforce, etc. so our customers can flex their current assets around us.
The smartest move we've made so far: Getting into the market quickly doing proof of concepts (POCs) and pilots. There are a ton of "AI" companies out there that underwhelm their customers after a lengthy and expensive onboarding phase, leaving damaged expectations. We get in, show what we can do quickly and then move on to bigger projects.
The biggest mistake we've made so far: Not going after the big competitors sooner. We didn't realize how much better our product was already at this stage, as they spin a good yarn.
Which leading entrepreneur or executive would you most want working in your corner? I am a big fan of Richard Branson, entrepreneur and founder of Virgin Group. He is an explorer in every sense of the word. Not only does he travel extensively, but he jumps right into new commercial markets with both feet. He is both a brand builder and a leader of people. His positive, can-do attitude permeates all of his endeavors and seems to bring out the best in those around him.
Our favorite team-building activity is: We host a weekly, company-wide event called Beer Friday that kicks-off with an end of week wrap-up. We acknowledge team members who did something amazing or helpful during the week, provide status updates on projects, and most importantly celebrate the wins for the week. Since we're a startup, we don't have a massive budget, but we do have awesome friends. The other week, our friends blew our minds! They hooked us up with a free kegerator!
The biggest thing we look for when hiring is: We look for people who have a growth mindset. We seek out people who are always looking to embrace challenges. Though we all play roles in the business, we like to see people step out of their roles to help each other be successful. We can only win as a team, so we want to attract people that like wearing different hats and working with others. We expect everyone to pitch in and help out with just about every aspect of growing and running a successful company.
What's the one piece of advice you'd give to other entrepreneurs just starting out: Do the groundwork first and make sure your product is viable.

Examples of 11 types of marketing that you should be aware of

All marketing has three core elements:

Content: This is the medium your message takes. Examples include print ads, TV commercials, digital ads, blog posts, videos, flyers in the mail, social media posts, emails, speeches, etc.

Distribution channels: This is the platform where you share the message. Examples include magazines, TV channels, webpages on the world wide web, search engines, the U.S. Postal Service, social networks, an email service provider, a street corner.

A marketing strategy: This is the premeditation of what you want to say, why you want to say it, how you want to say it, to whom, when, on what marketing channels and with what types of content.

11 types of marketing
Like music notes, the number of ways those three elements can play out is nearly endless. There are so many types of marketing born from the three basic components – definitely more than can fit in one listicle.
But if we had to pick the 11 greatest hits of our time, this is what they would be:

Advertising

Content marketing

Search engine marketing

Social media marketing

Call-to-action marketing

Direct marketing

Account-based marketing

Guerrilla marketing

Marketing automation

Public relations

Event marketing

Let's take a deeper dive into what each is all about.
A few terms to be familiar with first:

Inbound marketing: Involves creating solutions or content that are non-interruptive. The goal is to draw customers into engagements with your brand through organic means such as creating a blog that provides tips and tricks.

Outbound marketing: Also known as interruptive marketing (or push marketing), this is all about actively reaching out to customers to make them aware of your product or service. Some examples we'll cover in this post include TV commercials, direct email and digital advertising.

OK, for real this time:
1. Advertising
Advertising is what most people think about when they think about marketing: a TV commercial, a YouTube ad, a print ad in a magazine, an ad during a podcast, ads you might see on the subway, billboards on the highway, digital banner ads on the side of a news article and any other campaign where you paid someone to publish, print, display or air your ad.
Think of advertising as an imposition on your attention.
Ads kind of follow you around and actively try to get you to notice them. That's why advertising is often called interruption marketing. To avoid these interruptions, you might find yourself taking evasive measures – like muting the TV or changing channels during the commercial break, hitting the fast-forward 30 seconds button on a podcast and using an adblocker while browsing the web.
So why advertise?
Because it can be great for brand awareness, and it can be useful to target an audience that has already shown interest in your brand (that's why, for instance, you might see banner ads for discount boots on websites after you've been shopping for them).
The downside of advertising is that you're sure to be paying money every time you get your content in front of an audience. In this sense, it's less cost-effective over the course of a campaign than a well-executed organic content marketing effort.
2. Content marketing Unlike advertising, the purpose of content marketing is to create content that's so valuable to a target audience that they'll seek it out. Where do most people go when they're seeking out content?
The internet – and specifically a search engine.
That's why content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) are often conflated.
Technically, they're a little different.
Content marketing is the development of original high-quality content that a target audience will find useful, and that isn't overly promotional. This includes blog posts, podcasts, how-to-videos, original research, infographics, eBooks, white papers, free online tools and other non-interruptive marketing efforts.
SEO is about making this content more discoverable on search engines: It improves the odds that your target audience will discover your webpages when they search for questions and information that your brand has answered through digital content.
Content marketing and SEO both fall under the umbrella of digital marketing, which is why you may hear them imprecisely referred to as online marketing/internet marketing.
The core benefit of content marketing is that it gets people on your website, where you can further engage them – for instance, by encouraging them to sign up for your newsletter or to download additional resources in exchange for an email address. Great content also gives other sites something to link back to, which can help improve your site ranking.
3. Search engine marketing Think of search engine marketing (SEM) as the paid version of content marketing. It mostly consists of pay-per-click advertising using Google Ads.
The basic idea is that businesses pay Google a certain dollar amount each time someone clicks on a paid search result. Those paid search results are clearly labeled as ads (see the example above), which means that they tend to be clicked on less than organic results (results that do not say "Ad" next to them).
The thing to remember about SEM is that you need content on the other end of every banner ad and paid search result.
At a high level, SEM is just one type of digital advertising. Other ways to advertise on the web include:

Social media ads.

Ad distribution networks that post a banner on relevant sites.

The thing to remember about SEM is that you need content on the other end of every banner ad and paid search result. As such, SEM is most valuable as a supplement to a larger content marketing strategy.
4. Social media marketingSocial media marketing is exactly what it sounds like: the use of social media platforms to distribute unpaid content, like in the example above, or paid content, like this paid ad on Facebook:
The benefit of social media channels include:

Billions of people use it.

You can promote your brand and its content for free on social media.

You can turn satisfied customers into brand advocates on social media with user-generated content campaigns (think of this as as cost-effective form of influencer marketing where you encourage positive interactions with your brand on social networks).

There are many social media channels, and you can focus your attention more on the ones that matter most to your target market (Gen Z loves SnapChat and Instagram, for instance).

5. Call-to-action marketing A call to action (CTA) is a prompt to get anyone reading your content to take the desired action. These CTAs can live on your homepage, be embedded in a blog post or the end of an email, included in a social media post, etc.
They typically use action language, like:

Find out how.

Get your free quote.

Discover more savings.

Take the virtual tour.

Sign up for a free consultation.

Subscribe.

Download the eBook.

They can be presented as buttons that live in fixed parts of your site – like so:
They can be form fields on the landing page of downloadable marketing collateral:
Or they can be scroll activated pop-up boxes:
You can even include CTAs in your blog copy as anchor text.
The goal is to get a user to take an action, like providing an email in exchange for reading an eBook or a white paper.
That action should lead to deeper engagement with your brand. By capturing an email, for instance, you put that lead on a track for email marketing efforts.
In this sense, CTA marketing is a critical component of inbound marketing strategies where the goal is to lead users deeper into the sales funnel, and prime the pump for a conversation.
6. Direct marketing Direct marketing, sometimes called one-on-one marketing, is a direct proposal. It can be a proposal for a trial, or in the case of the example above, just a conversation.
Technically, direct marketing falls under the umbrella of outbound marketing. Tracy, for instance, might be a regular reader of the Brafton newsletter, but she didn't log onto her email that morning expecting to receive a personalized analysis of her site's domain authority followed by a request for a call. It may be a little more, say, direct than she's used to.
Nevertheless, direct marketing has its place in inbound marketing. It's possible, for instance, that Tracy downloaded, say, an eBook we wrote about building domain authority. In that case, she's an inbound lead that has been primed, making her an ideal prospect for a more direct approach.
Other examples of direct marketing are in the mail – like those "you're pre-approved" credit card offers, and cold calling a list of leads.
In a vacuum, direct marketing comes across as aggressive and spammy. But when well-timed as part of a bigger marketing plan, it can be the push that gets a prospect to become a customer.
7. Account-based marketing Account-based marketing is simply any marketing campaigns that target specific accounts. In the example above, GumGum – a computer vision technology company – was trying to close a deal with T-Mobile. They were so invested, that they hired a creative team to create a comic book inspired by the partnership of the two brands.
It's incredibly unconventional, but it supposedly got the attention of T-Mobile's CEO.
The gamble with account-based marketing is that it might not work. And if the campaign is too narrow in scope – say, like a comic book about T-Mobile – it runs the risk of being a wasted investment if the target ultimately gets away.
That's why, when creating ABM campaigns, it's always better to base them around personas as opposed to one specific customer if at all possible. You can reuse that content if it isn't overly specific.
8. Guerrilla marketing Guerrilla marketing is basically just any type of unconventional marketing that's meant to generate publicity for a brand.
It can be a clever, attention-grabbing ploy like the KitKat bench or this Frontline ad:
Generally speaking, the more unexpected and surprising the tactic, the better. At its best, guerrilla marketing inspires people to take to social media and gets bloggers, magazines and news outlets talking about the crazy-cool thing your brand did.
Guerrilla marketing is not to be confused with experiential marketing. They're similar in that they tend to be highly creative and attention-grabbing. However, the latter is a little more experience-oriented. An example would be Refinery 29's 29 rooms:
Guerrilla (and experiential) marketing doesn't have to be super expensive. However, it does require resourcefulness, and cautiousness not to end up on the wrong side of the law (especially if you plan to paint on things that don't technically belong to you).
Guerrilla marketing inspires people to take to social media and gets people talking about the crazy-cool thing your brand did.
9. Marketing automation Marketing automation is basically the practice of automating certain marketing tasks. An example is the automated email we send out to users who sign up for our newsletter.
A marketing automation platform can improve segmentation (creating lists of recipients) by programming certain messages to send out to certain leads at a very particular time and day.
Marketing automation was made for email marketing and digital advertising.
The idea is that certain content is sent to or displayed for certain users based on their content consumption habits. Said habits are recorded within a tool like Pardot or Marketo. Ideally, you'll know exactly what post the email contact was reading when they first gave you their information, and what, if any, marketing collateral they've downloaded since then.
Email drip campaigns are good examples of marketing automation. The contents of each message are based entirely on the recipient's interaction with the previous message. This ensures that the next message a recipient sees is the message that is most likely to get them engaging with your brand.
If you have any aspirations of launching an email marketing campaign and improving the precision of your interactions with leads as you go deeper into the sales funnel, you're going to need marketing automation resources.
10. Public relations Public relations is any attempt by a brand to maintain a favorable image for its audiences regardless of what might be happening. For example, when KFC experienced an embarrassing shortage of chicken in the U.K., it ran the above full-page ad in The Sun and Metro. The ad casts humor on the situation while providing a sincere apology to the chicken-deprived denizens of the U.K.
Public relations isn't reserved just for the KFCs of the world, though.
Small businesses also need PR. For instance, how they communicate with their customers and their business partners following a data breach is important to their recovery as an organization.
And PR doesn't necessarily have to follow a disaster. Highlighting your charitable exploits in a blog post is an opportunity to earn some positive publicity. So is attending local events in the community and publishing a press release when your brand is recognized by an industry magazine.
Anything you can do (within your means) to earn positive media attention will ultimately help your brand.
11. Event marketing Last but not least, event marketing is all the marketing and promotion efforts you take before, during and after an event.
Maybe it's an event you're hosting, like an industry conference, a lunch-and-learn or even a live webinar. When done right, a really well-executed event is its own form of marketing. But you need to actually have an audience at that event in the first place.
Start by creating a landing page for that event, and promoting it on your blog, through social media channels and via email.
Also consider live-Tweeting or posting on other social channels. Once it's over, create a blog post (or multiple posts) summarizing some of the highlights.
The same applies if you're participating in someone else's event or partaking in a well-known industry conference, and want to make sure people know you'll be there.
You don't necessarily have to be giving a keynote address, either. Even if you're just going to learn and network, share your experiences with other people on your blog and through social media (like we did when we went to MozCon and Content Marketing World). It also helps to have something to hand out during the event. These could be limited-time promos and coupons, company swag, a brochure or – at the very least – a business card.
Did we snub your favorite type of marketing? It's possible. Entire books have been written about marketing strategies.
But this was hopefully a good primer as you wade deeper into the world of marketing.

Universal Music Group (UMG) Rebrands Its College Marketing Program

Universal Music Group has declared its expectation to rebrand its school way of life showcasing program, moving ceaselessly from the past UMUSIC Experience arrangement to present °1824. It was on Thursday that the organization uncovered its arrangement at the solicitations, a yearly gathering that incorporates the grograms' group alongside the 85 understudies in the program.

"Our program has turned into a demonstrated craftsman and profession improvement stage," Senior VP and leader of the program Todd Goodwin said in an announcement. "In the course of the most recent four years, we advanced as our capacities exceeded those of conventional school programs. While vocation advancement, mentorship, and occupation situation will keep on being fundamental to our prosperity, it turned out to be clear we expected to overhaul our center program and, thusly, give our group a considerably bigger stage to feature their imagination by shaping °1824."

The new configuration of the program will concentrate on giving school reps "noteworthy jobs" on ventures for UMG's effort. Undertakings would incorporate influencer advertising, advertising, plan, filmmaking, and vital associations. General notes that the group was formerly chipping away at more than 40 ventures per month, including the off-camera arrangement Beyond The Barricade and Chop It Up, the meeting arrangement that highlights craftsmen flying in a helicopter over NYC.

The new °1824 has plans to create more than 100 yearly occasions that will incorporate "experiential enactments, screenings, HBCU homecoming occasions, and that's only the tip of the iceberg."

Twitter Says Advertising OK in Changed Terms of Service

Facebook, take note: Twitter changes terms for the better | Technology | Los Angeles Times: "Twitter Inc. changed its terms of service today to clarify that advertising on your Twitter page is OK and that users, not the company, own their tweets.
For months, ad services have flourished in certain circles of the social network. Twitter's legal provisions reinforce those companies' legitimacy.
Twitter also inserted sections to the user agreement addressing standards for third-party developers and intolerance for spammers, wrote co-founder Biz Stone on the company blog."

[Read the full article in the LA Times Technology section...]

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