ShopLocal Blog

When looking at local print as a advertising medium that can be extended online for additional distribution, why hold onto all of the typical limitations that a circular / FSI type promotion places such as: The non-reactive time line (most circulars are created month(s) in advance) of typical print ad production which limits the competitive [...]

Back in 2004, ShopLocal (called CrossMedia Services at the time) only had one single Canadian client – Staples Business Depot.  From that starting point to today, ShopLocal has really carved out a decent chunk of business inside of Canada with over 20 live sites that are dedicated to serving this market. With the recent partnership [...]

ShopLocal hosts the online circulars for many top retailers, and can track the behavior of the shoppers who visit those circulars to plan their shopping expeditions. In particular, we can track the shoppers as they: Interact with the circulars, in particular by clicking on individual offers, thus showing interest in those particular offers. We measure [...]

Consumers cross-shop, i.e. visit the online circulars of multiple retailers, to a significantly greater extent during the holidays. The chart below shows that the weekly cross-shopping pattern for the last two years has been very similar, peaking during the week of Black Friday both times, with 2008 peaking just a little lower: Evidently, shoppers responded [...]

Looking for some inspiration on what a weekly ad desktop application could be like? Here is a demo video (sorry, no sound) that showcases was may be possible as far as front end user interface (UI) / user experience (UX)  presentations around print content. Let your imagination run wild as the possibilities using this new [...]

Here is a overview video that Yahoo! put together on the SmartAds program for retail (otherwise called Yahoo! Circulars) that ShopLocal has been driving in partnership with Y! from day #1.  In a nutshell, Retail SmartAds combine: The amazing reach of the entire Yahoo! display ad network Best in class behavioral targeting (BT) as Y! [...]

Here is a quick demo that the ShopLocal team put together. This is a universal web widget (built in Adobe Flex 3 / Flash 9+) that has been wrapped by WidgetBox.  It’s pulling in live weekly ad content from Target (had to pick a retailer for example purposes and their content). The focus is not [...]

The number of retailer offers returned to normal seasonal levels in early December, but the latest updates show that was just a pause in the retailers’ promotional campaigns: The offer counts in the week of December 14-20 were unprecedented for mid-December, up 13% from 2007 Then the offer counts dropped abruptly on December 21, just [...]

So how do you take a bunch of flat and boring data and turn it into rich, colorful full motion high-definition video? Automagically of course via ShopLocal’s Video Circulars OnDemand product.  Retailers can now take their print collateral that is centrally focused on promoting the in-store deals and re-purpose these assets and add additional distribution [...]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the mobile WAP site efforts that Target & Wal-Mart have undertaken.  However these two examples are pretty robust and took a decent amount of developer time and testing to get them to the point where they are today.  But hope is NOT lost. Anyone, even those marketers on [...]