Sales & Marketing

By Rodney Mason, CMO, parago

Today, consumers have more information sources to help them make purchasing decisions. Smartphones, tablets, social media and the Internet — combined with traditional shopping channels like magazines and direct mail — means that deal-finding and comparison-shopping methods are almost always at consumers’ fingertips. As a result, shoppers are making their purchases faster.

Office Depot has won an Internet Advertising Competition Award (IAC) for “Best Retail Social Media Campaign” from the Web Marketing Association.

The award recognizes Office Depot’s innovative digital campaign supporting back-to-school with Office Depot’s “#Together Against Bullying” collaboration with the band One Direction.

Brentwood, Tenn. -- Tractor Supply Company announced that Lee Downing has been promoted to executive VP store operations, effective April 14. In conjunction with his promotion, he will assume added leadership responsibilities for the company's real estate team.

In addition to leading the store operations and store support administration teams, Downing will be responsible for the strategic new store site selection, facilitation of store openings and ongoing maintenance, in addition to other real estate functions.

San Francisco — Mobile shopping platform ShopSavvy, has enhanced its AdOns advertising network to support iBeacon integration. The upgrade allows ShopSavvy AdOns partners to run more targeted in-store contextual ads.  

San Francisco -- Gap Inc. highlighted its use of technology and innovation to bridge the growing digital world with its physical stores at the company’s annual meeting with investors. In new initiatives, the retailer is expanding its reserve in-store service to all U.S. Gap stores by the end of the second quarter, enabling online and mobile shoppers to now reserve items at more than 1,000 Gap and Banana Republic store locations.

New York - Online video viewers, compared to non-online video viewers, are more frequent patrons of quick-service restaurants (QSR). A new study from video marketing platform Videology shows that those who watch video were 60% more likely to visit QSRs after hearing about a promotion or seeing an advertisement, regardless of the medium.

Shoe Carnival is collaborating with Lifetime’s “Devious Maids” to further promote the company’s first national, integrated advertising campaign. The advertising campaign coincides with the season two premiere of the series, which will debut Sunday, April 20, at 10 p.m. EDT/PDT.

New York – PriceGrabber and StellaService are launching a partnership where PriceGrabber will display StellaService's online retailer ratings and customer service performance data on PriceGrabber.com. In addition, PriceGrabber will act as a distribution partner for StellaService to its network of digital publishers.