Are Crocs cool? According to inMarket Location Data, the answer is... yes.

Crocs has topped inMarket's Back-to-School Retail rankings for 2017, drawing the largest spike in foot traffic of any retailer during the busy July/August shopping period. Aeropostale, Staples, PacSun and Kids Foot Locker also had strong draws druing the 2017 back-to-school rush. 

Contrarily, Neiman Marcus, Gap and Banana Republic all saw dips in foot traffic this summer. All three have announced store closures in the past 10 days.  

You can download the full report today at www.inmarket.com/insights. If you're interested in learning more about the rankings, just give us a shout over at www.inmarket.com/contact.

At inMarket, we've harnessed the power of location data in advertising since 2010. From our early in-store campaigns to the sophisticated, online-to-offline programs we run today, one thing has remained consistent: We've always managed those campaigns in-house.

But the demand for accuracy in programmatic has become too great. Today, we're extending our hyper-accurate Audiences segmenting product to programmatic trading desks. Brands and agencies can now access our walled garden of first-party location data previously only accessible via high-ROI managed campaigns.

Audiences will provide trading desks with unprecedented accuracy via our location database, which uses full cycle GPS, WiFi and the world’s largest beacon platform in a waterfall to continually validate data points. Opt-in consumer location data paired with our vast point-of-interest marketing platform reveals consumers’ journeys between POIs -- while personas derived from machine learning across billions of consumers data points make targeting more precise than ever.

Audiences also enables new first party location precision that dramatically reduces crossover contamination in dense markets -- for example, when a laundromat is next store to a restaurant. This unlocks superior targeting for brands. The same first party dataset enables inMarket to predict major business trends across America -- like customer loyalty -- via inMarket inSights.

If you're interested in learning more about inMarket Audiences, contact us today.

The New York Post is reporting that embattled retailer Nine West is close to shutting down, according to multiple sources.

"Nine West Holdings, owned by private equity firm Sycamore Partners, is mulling an auction proceeding that could spur a liquidation of the chain, according to sources familiar with the situation.

Licensing firms have been approached to determine their interest in the company’s brands, which include Anne Klein, Gloria Vanderbilt, l.e.i., Givenchy Jewelry and 14 others, which are sold in department stores and which have been hit hard by the shopping mall downturn."

The news isn't surprising if you look at the inMarket Location Data: In June, inMarket found that Nine West ranked last for customer loyalty in the non-grocery retail category -- behind failing retailers like Wet Seal and bebe.

While many might take this to be another sign of the retail apocalypse, we see it as a sign that retail is instead undergoing a massive evolution. There's a blend of online and offline happening in both directions. While retailers like Nine West head for closures, e-commerce giants like Amazon are jumping into the real world with their Whole Foods acquisition. There's a ton of value into serving customers in the here-and-now. It's up to the existing brick-and-mortar stores to adopt data-driven, e-commerce style practices that improve the in-store experience and attract customers back to the store. If they don't, the Amazons of the world will. 

E-commerce won't kill brick-and-mortar retail, the same way VHS didn't kill the cinema. But -- offline will have to adapt.

Location data can help us predict business trends -- and sometimes, those trends are quite surprising. This week, Bloomberg has featured inMarket location data in its story about customer loyalty at rapidly growing Shake Shack. 

"As Shake Shack Inc. expands across the U.S. from its New York home base, it’s missing a key ingredient: customer loyalty....

Though the upscale burger chain has more prestige than rivals like Subway and Chick-fil-A, its higher prices may be preventing customers from ordering as often."

You can read their full story here, or download the full  Loyalty Report for Restaurants at inmarket.com/insights.

Mobile location data tells the story of the world around us. At inMarket, we use it to power award-winning O2O ad products while analyzing business trends for brick-and-mortar businesses across many categories.

This week, we're using inMarket Location Data to rank the top and bottom Full Service Restaurants (FSRs) and Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs) for customer loyalty. It’s the second installment in our inSights program that looks at loyalty across various categories (like retail). We use repeat device visitation from over 50 million anonymous consumers to determine which businesses are performing better (or worse) than average.

In general, the higher a business ranks for customer loyalty, the more likely it is to be thriving and expanding. Contrarily, many of the businesses toward the bottom of the rankings are struggling with bankruptcy, closures and poor sales.

The full report is available at inmarket.com/insights today. Feel free to contact us with any questions.

Are you heading to the Street Fight Summit in Brooklyn this week? If so, swing by the inMarket booth and say hello. We'll be talking about how mobile location is powering best-in-class digital advertising for offline brands; and how that same data can be used to predict business and market trends.

Can't make it out to Brooklyn? Drop us a note anytime at inmaket.com/contact.

eMarketer -- the leader in e-business data + research -- has featured inMarket's latest inSights report on generational shopping trends. We've included an excerpt below, and encourage you to check out the full story here. 

According to InMarket's new "Foot Traffic Power Rankings," millennials show a distinct preference for discount options when it comes to brick-and-mortar shopping.

The rankings are based on analysis of foot traffic to physical stores, using mobile location data from January through April 2017. Rankings are determined by frequency of visits compared with the category average for each generation. 

For the general retail category, the top three brands were discount purveyors of apparel. The No. 1 brand was Ross Stores, followed by privately held Rainbow and then Burlington Stores. Bridal chain DaVinci and home-furnishing giant Ikea rounded out the list.

You can download the full report over at inmarket.com/insights.  

Tech.Co, a publication that celerates tech, entrepreneurism and creativity, has ranked inMarket as one of Los Angeles' "22 Startups to Watch Out For." 

According to Tech.Co, "While the Bay Area hold the title of most prolific startup ecosystem, there’s no denying that California is a veritable gold mine of entrepreneurial talent. Los Angeles, for one, is not only brimming with innovative ideas, it’s also home to a wide range of unique startups that are solving the problems of the world."

Check out the full story here. 

Digital advertising for offline stores just got a whole lot more powerful.

After a year in beta, inMarket has launched its Lapsed Shopper Program to identify and recover customers who have stopped visiting partner retailers' stores. 

The program is similar to what ecommerce has been doing for a nearly decade: Identifying web visitors who have lapsed, and retargeting them back to the site through tactics like display or email. But in the offline world, instead of tracking web visits, we're measuring real-world store visits over time. 

Chuck Martin from MediaPost puts it nicely: "Location tracking over time is starting to provide totally new advertising opportunities based on longer-term behaviors of a shopper beyond a single store visit. inMarket...has created an additional shopper behavior model, by focusing on people who stop going to a particular store. The technology can identify a shopper who was regularly going to a store and then stopped, say after a 30-day period. Once identified, those consumers can be sent a relevant ad from the retailer, which could include an incentive to go back."

Check out our official press release below, or drop us a line to hear more about how you can put it to the test. 

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Today, inMarket is pleased to welcome Cameron V. Peebles to the team as CMO. 

Having previously led marketing initiatives for mobileStorm, Stamps.com Enterprise and Nero Software, Peebles most recently served as Chief Marketing Officer of Airpush, a top global mobile advertising platform. At Airpush, Cameron was credited was bootstrapping the company to $100 million in revenue, while helping the company to rack up a wide array of industry accolades, including Marketing Department of the Year (Gold) at the 2015 Best in Biz International Awards, and Marketing Executive of the Year (Silver) at the 2015 Best in Biz U.S. Awards.

“Since 2010, inMarket has set the standard for real time engagement at the moment of truth and helped brands gain unprecedented advantage through beacon technology at scale. Now, as our space matures and we enter a seventh consecutive year of growth, we know that sharing our vision with the community will be an integral part of our next chapter,” said Todd Dipaola, CEO and cofounder of inMarket. “Cameron has the perfect blend of marketing experience, savvy and the entrepreneurial spirit to lead our marketing team to continued success in the future.”

Cameron’s arrival at inMarket comes at a time of widespread growth for the company known for its market-leading beacon deployments in retail, bars, restaurants and nightlife.

“The strategies and technologies that brands use to engage with consumers in mobile have been consistently improving since the introduction of smartphones nearly a decade ago,” Cameron is quoted in a release issued by the company. “inMarket’s industry leading technology, impressive track record of driving ROI and history of consistent growth is second to none. I’m very proud to be leading the company’s marketing initiatives as we expand even faster and reach many more exciting milestones.”