– Your Bright Brothers Team
David Romako / Josh Yeager /  Brandi Walsh

It may seem like a disconnect to be thinking about cozy hot chocolates, holiday lights and ugly sweater parties when it’s 90+ degrees outside, but the time is now to get the jump on your holiday planning. To get you in the mood (and get you some superior results), Bright Brothers has put together a timely and topical Trends Report for Holiday 2022. It’s a quick read with tips, pointers, strategies and tactics for making maximum impact for your community this holiday season. And no matter what time of year it is, ultimately that’s why we’re all here — to do best by our merchants, ratepayers and communities. So crank up that Mariah Carey album (or don’t) and take a sip with a peppermint stick over here to get crackin’!

Philly is always good for a laugh, and our friends at The Onion nailed it with this hilarious piece on parking. In all seriousness, there’s a lot to love about “The City of Brotherly Love”, and this new program fills our hearts with joy. If you remember, a few issues back we explored Philadelphia’s new legislation requiring developers to plant or replace treescape within the city or face fines. That’s all part of a citywide initiative to regreen the city after years of neglect, and this newest component creating a “Reforestation Hub” has multipronged benefits. Rather than going directly to wood-chippers or landfills, Philly will soon start selling felled trees and milling salvageable sections of removed trees with part of the proceeds funding TreePhilly; which in turn plants new trees and maintains others around the city. But the bennies don’t end there. The hub itself will employ a growing workforce, as well as supporting a workforce development program that “…recruits ‘disconnected’ young adults and returning citizens to learn real-world skills via environmental stewardship initiatives,”. It all ends up creating a sustainable and tenable program with myriad benefits for the entire community, and we ❤ that to no end!

Photo credit: Bradley Maule

We’ve been talking about the potential implications of GDPR and the CCPA for years now, and just last week the gavel hit the block — and Sephora was hit with a $1.2MM settlement with the state of California over data privacy violations. Data privacy is no joke, and every single website should have a clear and published policy of how they handle data. And we’re not just talking about email databases and opt-outs, because the way that the California AG interpreted and pursued Sephora for the violations have MUCH deeper implications for any sites using cookies or pixels. If you’re in marketing, you know that cookies and pixels are part and parcel to everything from the way Google Analytics tracks your site’s activity, usage and visitors, to running ads on social platforms and tracking completed actions. It’s so commonplace that this milestone has the potential to up-end the internet as we know it. And we’re not talking in hyperbolic terms either. Apparently Sephora is just the first of many online retailers to settle with the state, and apparently California has been serving notices in abundance to other online retailers. Aaron Grote, VP of digital products at Stirista, a data services and marketing firm, stated that, “This is the California government saying, ‘We’re taking this seriously,’…If you’re sharing customer data with a vendor who has not signed a service provider agreement, you’re considered to be selling data and are assuming all of the CCPA obligations and risks that come with that.”  And that’s certainly not putting lipstick on a pig.

We recently read that the new director (and the first Latino director, we might add!) of the U.S.Census Bureau wants to make the agency more humanistic. Pretty interesting. Then we stumbled upon this bang-up site from the bureau that visualizes data from the 2020 census. We’re definitely data nerds over here, so we geeked out hard looking at how the population and reporting has changed over the years. You can configure the fields to show national trends or drill down by state and city levels. Who’s up, who’s down, what’s the fastest growing region of the U.S. and who’s lost the most population are all included — as well as deep dive stats on age, racial makeup and distribution. Variations in the way our government collects and tracks racial intel have changed several times, and the data goes back over five decades to 1970.  Click around and have fun, and share this link with another loveable data dork in your life!

Photo credit:  Census Bureau

Thrillist is like the “King of Fluff Pieces”, but sometimes their reporting just hits different, and we really dug this piece on “The Must-Visit Small Town in Every State”. It can’t be a coincidence that this article dropped mere days before the long Labor Day weekend, and with gas prices correcting, we suspect some of these towns were hoppin’ and poppin’ this past weekend!  We saw some interesting choices listed, added some new gems to our travel bucket list, and there are some downright stinkers. But what’s your take? Think they nailed it for your state, or would you propose a better must-visit small town destination?  Either way, have a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend!

Photo credit: Brian Papazov, Unsplash