In recent years, developments have taken place that are dramatically changing the role of stationary retail, putting it under pressure and questioning its right to exist.

Xandr, AT&T’s advertising and analytics company, and iflix, Southeast Asia’s leading entertainment service, announced that iflix’s brand solutions business, iflix Advertising, will adopt Xandr Monetize, Xandr’s strategic selling platform. As a result of the agreement, advertisers gain access to iflix’s premium brand-safe video inventory and highly-engaged audiences at-scale.

According to a survey of the market research firm eMarketer, global spending for online advertising will reach nearly 427 billion US dollars in 2020. But how can advertisers use their media budget effectively and to the greatest success for their campaigns?

The proportion of digital contact points, significant for the success of your own business model, is growing. As a result, the online customer journey has become an integral part of the customer intelligence strategy today. In addition to the online advertising contacts that take place along the entire digital customer journey, one's own website plays a central role here, too. Whether in traditional eCommerce or lead generation, the focus is always on the user. With the help of digital analytics, the behavior and needs of users can be better understood so that in-depth recommendations for action can be derived, thus, leading to improved service, a better product, and an optimized customer experience.

Qlik, a leader in data analytics, just announced Qlik Sense Business, its latest offering supporting its cloud-first, SaaS strategy. The new product is the first and only pure SaaS offering that brings the power of the 3rd generation of data and analytics to small businesses and groups, accelerating their journey to modern analytics more quickly and with greater ROI than any other offering in the market.

Qualtrics launched CoreXM, its industry-leading insight solution and foundation of experience management (XM). CoreXM encapsulates all the innovative capabilities previously found in Qualtrics Research Core while adding ground-breaking functionality to help experience management professionals listen to their customers and employees, understand their experiences, and take real-time action.

Measuring and optimization are the nuts and bolts in digital marketing since precision and deep understanding of how to compare and synchronize different data sources are key to the quality of the results and the success of campaigns. If marketers work consistently on a data-driven basis and align all measurements with the needs of the customers, more turnover with the same budget or budget savings can be most certainly achieved while maintaining the same turnover.  Considering the following prerequisites definitely helps:

Perx Technologies, a leading enterprise cloud platform that helps businesses connect and engage with their customers, announced that it has inked a partnership with StarHub, a leading homegrown Singapore company that delivers world class communications, entertainment and digital solutions.

Criteo announced that its leading header bidding solution, Criteo Direct Bidder (CDB), is now compatible with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), the web component framework developed by Google that has the mission to "provide a user-first format for web content".

While artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the top technologies that will change the Singaporean business landscape in the next three years, most organizations in Singapore are still fearful of AI. Are we really talking about Singapore, which comes in third in the World Economic Forum’s list of the most innovative cities in the world?

Blis, a company specialized in understanding real, human behavior by analyzing vast quantities of mobile location data, provides businesses with information about what people actually do to help them improve consumer engagement and deliver measurable sales uplift. Its Smart Platform provides unmatched transparency, accuracy and scale through three proprietary technologies: SmartPin, Smart Scale and Smart Places, which enable more effective planning, activation and measurement for marketers and business decision makers alike.

CastingAsia, an influencer marketing technology solutions provider and part of AnyMind Group, announced the launch of cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and cost-per-click (CPC) capabilities on the CastingAsia platform, in a bid to provide a way for marketers to better address the impact that influencer marketing can have on a business.

When it comes to what makes a successful marketing campaign, today it is obviously the situation that determines the value, since the geographic location of the customer is decisive: consumers are used to having their taxi picking them up right where they are, they read online reviews for the best restaurants in their area before making reservations; and search by app for the nearest parking lot.

While the retail industry felt threatened by the digital world a few years ago, digitization is by now increasingly evaluated as an opportunity. They must embrace new technology to step up to the plate of identifying the right trends at the right time and the right way to capitalize on this opportunity - and not lose sight and feel for their own business by overdosing on data and technology.