Tag: News

Tiger Pistol Partners with Anheuser-Busch InBev for Worldwide Local Recovery and Revitalization Initiative

Posted on by Tiger Pistol
Global-to-Local Social Advertising Technology Made Available for 5 Million Bars, Restaurants and Retailers Worldwide

Tiger Pistol, the only social advertising platform that delivers local activation at global scale, has partnered with Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) to support the brand’s worldwide network of local retailers, bars, and restaurants that have been affected by COVID-19.

“We all have our go-to local establishments, whether it’s the neighborhood pub for happy hour, our favorite dinner spot, or our chosen venue for celebrating milestones,” said Paul Elliott, CEO, Tiger Pistol. “Very few companies have a global footprint like AB InBev, and they support their worldwide community and make sure their establishments have everything they need to weather the storm today and succeed in a new normal future.”

Restaurants and bars are among the hardest hit industries across the globe. According to Statista, the year-over-year decline of seated patrons in restaurants worldwide dropped day by day February to May reaching a staggering 100% decline by early May A study by Deloitte states that while global at-home consumption has increased, it will unlikely cover the cost of lost sales even once the situation begins to normalize. In a survey by Technomic, 32% of consumers say they plan to eat at restaurants less often out of COVID-19 concerns. With layoffs and hour cuts prevalent across the industry, restaurants and bars need help to survive the crisis. In a Datassential survey, 33% of operators cited they needed help communicating their establishment’s status, and 25% of local operators cited the need for collaboration to promote traffic.

Tiger Pistol provides the ability to reach deeply into local communities all throughout the world, empowering individual restaurants and bars with locally relevant ads that use powerful messaging alongside globally-recognized brand creative. The ads are flexibly deployed from the local business’ Facebook Page, with objectives in line with state, regional, or city-level government restrictions. This social strategy gives these small retailers, most of whom are suffering during this time, an advertising option to help them continue to drive business and recall the essential role restaurants and bars play in fostering memories and connections in the lives of consumers.

“Tiger Pistol’s global-to-local approach marries two strategies together to ensure AB InBev’s success,” said Elliott.  “First, it brings their brands directly to consumers for immediate identification. Second, the local establishments can drive a personal connection with the consumer. By providing enterprise-strength tools to the local market, the consumer ends up with a highly relevant, localized ad.”

With each region affected differently, AB InBev and Tiger Pistol are working closely with the brand’s global markets to create social media marketing plans to support small businesses during this crisis and to help them recover. AB InBev uses the Tiger Pistol Platform to support the following initiatives, among others, worldwide:

  • Brazil, with tens of thousands of locations with local Facebook and Instagram campaigns that promote new e-commerce options, including through Ze Delivery, a delivery app that ABI Brazil created to promote online ordering and delivery services available from their favorite local spots, and with planned campaigns to help businesses connect with consumers in the post-crisis environment.
  • Belgium and the UK, with campaigns to promote their “Cafe Courage” and “Save Pub Life” initiatives that allow patrons to purchase gift cards or make donations to support their favorite hang outs, and with planned campaigns to help businesses promote their new operating hours and safety protocols to consumers as they begin to re-open.
  • Canada, with campaigns that support local on- and off-premise establishments in promoting take-out and online ordering and delivery options.

These efforts are part of a long-term partnership to provide AB InBev’s worldwide network of restaurants, bars, and retailers with an industry-leading platform for publishing high performance, local Facebook and Instagram ads.

AB InBev first engaged Tiger Pistol for a Facebook advertising pilot in 2019. Tiger Pistol developed a simple, effective way for local establishments to automatically publish on-brand, best-practice Facebook ads straight from the local establishment’s Facebook Business Page. The campaigns produced a 60% lower cost of advertising among other remarkable results. AB InBev continued to expand the program throughout the year, culminating in a global multi-year partnership.

“We are partnering with Tiger Pistol to develop new tools that evolve how we market our brands and build relationships with our network of establishments – both in a time of crisis and in ordinary times,” said Gabriel Mello, Global Vice President of Category Management and Trade Solutions, AB InBev. “Their technology and knowledge of social advertising have made Tiger Pistol the right partner to collaboratively develop a scaled social advertising solution.”

Let’s talk about what Tiger Pistol can do to locally activate social advertising for your brand. Contact us today.

Tiger Pistol Hires SVP of Talent and Enablement

Posted on by Tiger Pistol
Kierston Vaughn Tapped to Develop and Manage Scalable Structure for Corporate Culture and Talent Enablement

Tiger Pistol, the only social advertising platform that delivers local activation at a global scale, recently formalized the hiring of Kierston Vaughn as SVP of Talent and Enablement. Vaughn began working with Tiger Pistol in April of 2019 as a talent consultant.

“Kierston has been extremely dedicated to creating an environment that is based on the principles of a growth mindset, exciting and empowering team members to achieve new heights, breaking new boundaries with our clients, one another, and ourselves,” said Paul Elliott, CEO, Tiger Pistol. “Kierston encourages team members to develop and lead new initiatives and use their natural talents to contribute to company culture, content, product innovation, and client success. She brings a wealth of experience in high growth companies, both small and large, making her a perfect fit to lead our innovative company culture.”

A dynamic talent executive with a background in the consulting and digital marketing industries, Vaughn holds more than 20 years experience in helping companies build thriving cultures through growth and process change. Having previously worked for companies like Accenture, Rosetta, Razorfish Global, Kalibrate, and Robots & Pencils, her approach to talent is founded in a deep understanding of service industry business models in a global context. She excels at building cultures that enable teams and individuals to deliver their best for client satisfaction. Vaughn will continue to enhance Tiger Pistol’s recruitment and engagement efforts to ensure an architecture that aligns talent and experience with the company’s aggressive growth.

“I’m so proud and excited to become an official part of the incredible team and culture at Tiger Pistol,” said Vaughn. “I’m humbled by this team and their passion for their work. I can’t wait to see all the great things our team can accomplish, and I am committed to providing each member with the tools and structure to develop and grow.”

Kierston earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Organizational Leadership and Supervision from Purdue University and is an affiliate of the Society of Human Resource Management. She has been a certified Professional in HR [PHR] since 2003.

About Tiger Pistol 

Tiger Pistol is the world’s #1 social advertising automation platform for local. For nearly a decade, the company has been obsessively focused on building the world’s most effective social advertising platform for global brands, resellers, and agencies who realize the power of local activation at scale. As a preferred Facebook Marketing Partner and the largest third-party publisher of social advertising for local, Tiger Pistol creates, deploys, manages, and optimizes high-performance Facebook and Instagram ads at unprecedented scale, with over 800k Facebook and Instagram campaigns published to date. Tiger Pistol’s first of its kind technology delivers meaningful and measurable business impact for brands, resellers, and agencies alike, helping to unlock value and efficiency through innovation-led social advertising automation. Tiger Pistol has been recognized by Digiday as the Best Social Media Marketing Platform, by Street Fight for Best Social Media Campaign and by Localogy as Best Localized Marketing Campaign. Tiger Pistol Ranks in the Top 100 on the Inc. 5000 List of Texas’s Fastest Growing Private Companies and in the top 5 among advertising and marketing companies. To learn more, call (888) 400-8845, visit TigerPistol.com, or follow on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Pivoting to Ensure Real Estate Agent Success in Uncertain Times

Posted on by Talia Wachtel
Tiger Pistol and Realogy Accelerate Roadmap for Social Ad Engine, a Social Advertising for Real Estate Tool

For over a year, Tiger Pistol has provided the platform for many of Realogy’s agents’ and brokers’ social advertising needs. Social Ad Engine is built for easy publishing of best-practice local Facebook and Instagram listing campaigns. Realogy and Tiger Pistol quickly reacted to the needs of agents since the spread of COVID-19 by changing up their roadmap to focus on releasing features that help agents continue to be productive during this time.

In a recent interview with Inman, the leading independent news publisher for the residential real estate industry, Christian Russo, Senior Director of Product Management at Realogy, discussed how Social Ad Engine’s roadmap has been accelerated to accommodate the needs of agents and brokers in today’s environment, including prioritization of supporting videos in listings to show virtual tours, as well as the ability for agents to promote themselves without a listing.

“We saw a need to rapidly get this out to our agents as quickly as possible so they can leverage that new functionality and reach their community and speak to their community in a more personal way than just promoting listings.” 

– Christian Russo, Senior Director of Product Management, Realogy

Click Here to Read the full article.

Tiger Pistol Adds Recurring Campaign Feature to its Social Advertising Platform

Posted on by Tiger Pistol Marketing
New Capability Allows Clients to Boost Revenue by Offering Ongoing Campaigns

Tiger Pistol, the only social advertising platform that delivers local activation at global scale, recently launched a Recurring Campaign feature to expand user options for managing Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns on the platform.

“Tiger Pistol has taken our innovative technology to a new level of scale and efficiency with Recurring Campaigns,” said Paul Elliott, CEO, Tiger Pistol. “Now our clients can further automate their campaign creation process to drastically cut operational hours and dramatically boost profits with recurring revenue.”

Recurring Campaigns allows users to run multiple ongoing campaigns at a time. Here, we can see the different assets selected for each Recurring Campaign. Only the selected items will generate into that Recurring Campaign’s future campaigns. For example, this customer has a Recurring Campaign devoted to getting users to download their app and another to visit their website.

The capability allows clients to effectively and efficiently set up and manage multiple, auto-generated social advertising campaigns at the same time. Clients can now run multiple recurring campaigns with customized campaign dates, ad objectives, audiences, and creative assets for their end-advertisers. This feature enables clients to schedule future seasonal campaigns, promotions, and offers in advance, while still taking advantage of Tiger Pistol’s automated A/B testing.

“This capability is so intuitive, with its sleek and instinctive user interface, that even those with limited knowledge of Facebook advertising can easily configure campaigns that will continue to optimize month over month,” said Casey Zaffin, VP Client Management, Tiger Pistol. “The ease-of-use allows clients to distribute multiple recurring Facebook and Instagram campaigns in just minutes.”

With Recurring Campaigns, clients also have the opportunity to A/B test multiple campaign assets on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, taking advantage of Facebook’s campaign budget optimization to achieve high performing, low cost advertising campaigns.

“Recurring Campaigns are a particularly useful capability for clients who have static long-term campaigns they want to set-and-forget, while still ensuring that ads are optimized based on performance,” said Zaffin. “Since launch, we’ve already seen great success with ads focused on promotional content, and seasonal and holiday campaigns.”

“When clients and their teams can spend less time building campaigns, they can spend more time focusing on optimization and growth,” said Elliott. “With the ability to input a variety of assets and control campaign launches, Recurring Campaigns are an ideal solution for any large-scale advertiser.”

See how Tiger Pistol’s Recurring Campaign capability can boost your profits. Request a demo today!

Tiger Pistol Named Localogy Excellence Award Winner

Posted on by Tiger Pistol Marketing
Tiger Pistol Technology Creates Critical Connection Between Real Estate Agents and Homebuyers

Tiger Pistol, the only social advertising platform that delivers local activation at global scale, today announced that it has won the prestigious Localogy Excellence Award for “Best Localized Marketing Campaign.”

“Very few industry groups understand marketing success in the local marketplace the way Localogy does,” said Paul Elliott. “Time and again, Tiger Pistol’s global-to-local approach outperforms comparable brand-level campaign executions, and Localogy’s recognition of Tiger Pistol for ‘Best Localized Marketing Campaign’ further emphasizes our category leadership and business impact.”

Tiger Pistol stood out among industry competitors based on the remarkable social advertising results achieved for a Fortune 500 real estate services provider, with a network of over 200,000 real estate agents.

The solution enables the client’s agents to easily promote their listings and themselves with auto-configured, best practice Facebook and Instagram campaigns.

“Tiger Pistol’s power lies in the ability for agents to publish campaigns directly from their own agent-branded Facebook Page,” said Talia Wachtel, VP Client Management, Tiger Pistol. “While other real estate marketing platforms support Facebook ads, such ads are usually rudimentary, driving impressions around the listing, with little room for the agent to generate leads. Tiger Pistol leverages the most relevant Facebook Ads Objectives to drive the results that matter. Our platform supports the ability for agents to publish Facebook Lead Ads, and auto-creates best practice Facebook Lead Forms that have unique qualifying questions, making it easy for the agent to launch the ad with little knowledge of Facebook ads.”

Tiger Pistol is also proud to announce that two of their partners were also honored by Localogy. Hibu, the leading provider of digital marketing solutions to local businesses across the United States, won a Localogy Excellence Award for “Most Significant Business Transformation” as the company made the titanic shift from a print and Yellow Pages-driven business to a digital marketing solutions provider, and BrandMuscle, and integrated local and channel marketing solutions provider, won “Best Go-to-Market Strategy.”

The Localogy Excellence Awards recognize organizations and individual leaders shaping the future of localization for the more than 30 million local and small businesses who depend on them every day.

Learn how Tiger Pistol unlocks local activation at global scale for brands. 

Tiger Pistol Ranks in Top 100 on the Inc. 5000 List of Texas’s Fastest Growing Private Companies

Posted on by Tiger Pistol Marketing

Inc. Magazine recently revealed that Tiger Pistol, the only social advertising platform that delivers local activation at global scale, is No. 59 on its inaugural Inc. 5000 Series: Texas list, and top 5 among advertising and marketing companies. The list encompasses the most prestigious ranking of the fastest-growing Texas-based private companies.

Companies named to the list exhibit stunning rates of growth across all industries in Texas. The list’s 250 private companies had an average growth rate of 294 percent. Companies based in the largest metro areas—Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio—brought in the highest revenue overall.

“Tiger Pistol’s innovations have sparked explosive growth and ongoing client loyalty, and recognition on this list validates our category leadership.” said Paul Elliott, Tiger Pistol CEO. “Our unwavering focus on social advertising automation has yielded a unique, innovative, trusted, and results-oriented partnership with some of the largest global brands and resellers that realize the power of local activation at scale.”

Born of the annual Inc. 5000 franchise, this regional list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the Texas economy’s most dynamic segment—its independent small businesses.

“The companies on this list demonstrate just how much the small-business sector impacts Texas’s economy,” says Inc. Editor in Chief Scott Omelianuk. “Across every single industry, these businesses have posted revenue and growth rates that are beyond impressive, further proving the tenacity of their founders and CEOs.”

“Tiger Pistol has developed the future of social advertising at scale across the Facebook family of apps,” said Elliott. “While many others have tried to enter the market Tiger Pistol established, the company’s continued focus on agile technology innovation, speed to market, social advertising expertise, deep partnerships with Facebook and our clients, and use of data to drive smarter automation and superior results, truly sets it apart.”

Complete results of the Inc. 5000 Series: Texas, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, metro area, and other criteria, can be found at inc.com/inc5000-series-texas-2020.

To learn more about Tiger Pistol’s social advertising tools and how Tiger Pistol, the world’s #1 social advertising automation platform for local, unlocks local activation at global scale for brands, resellers, and agencies contact us today. 

About Tiger Pistol 

Tiger Pistol is the world’s #1 social advertising automation platform for local. For nearly a decade, the company has been obsessively focused on building the world’s most effective social advertising platform for global brands, resellers, and agencies who realize the power of local activation at scale. As a preferred Facebook Marketing Partner and the largest third-party publisher of social advertising for local, Tiger Pistol creates, deploys, manages, and optimizes high-performance Facebook and Instagram ads at unprecedented scale, with over 800k Facebook and Instagram campaigns published to date. Tiger Pistol’s first of its kind technology delivers meaningful and measurable business impact for brands, resellers, and agencies alike, helping to unlock value and efficiency through innovation-led social advertising automation. Tiger Pistol has been recognized by Digiday as the Best Social Media Marketing Platform, and by Street Fight for Best Social Media Campaign. To learn more, call (888) 400-8845, visit TigerPistol.com, or follow on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

About Inc. Media

The world’s most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections, and community to build great companies. Its award-winning multiplatform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including websites, newsletters, social media, podcasts, and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers, and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent. The associated Inc. 5000 Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit www.inc.com.

Facebook Launches Grant Program to Help Small Businesses

Posted on by Laura Kraay

On Tuesday, May 17th, Facebook announced an upcoming grant program aimed to help SMB retailers during COVID-19. It will consist of $100 million in cash grants and ad credits for up to 30,000 eligible businesses. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg expanded on the importance of this initiative in her Facebook post:

Small businesses are the heartbeat of our communities, and many of the people who run these businesses are heavily affected by the crisis …We’ve listened to small businesses to understand how we can best help them. We’ve heard loud and clear that financial support could enable them to keep the lights on and pay people who can’t come to work.

The program is aimed to help businesses cover things like rent and operational costs, as well as connecting with more customers and keeping the workforce strong. For those interested in applying, stay tuned, as more details will be available in the upcoming weeks. You can also sign up for updates directly from Facebook here. 

In the meantime, Facebook has updated their Business Resource Hub with a page specific to managing and building resilience during this ordeal. It includes ideas for staying in touch with customers (like pinning your important updates) and other concrete steps for the unexpected challenges we’re facing. 

We love and support our SMBs. Tiger Pistol is here to answer any questions you may have.

Tiger Pistol Hires New Director of Client Success

Posted on by Tiger Pistol Marketing
Ashley Clark Tapped to Lead and Enhance Services and Support Team

Tiger Pistol, the only social advertising platform that delivers local activation at global scale, recently added Ashley Clark to its executive leadership team as Director of Client Success. 

Ashley Clark, Director Client Success
Ashley Clark, Director Client Success

“Ashley’s hiring is part of Tiger Pistol’s continued investment in providing world-class customer service and support to our clients,” said Paul Elliott, CEO, Tiger Pistol. “As we continue our rapid  growth, Ashley will help ensure that we continually elevate and evolve the standards by which we communicate with and nurture the partnerships with our clients and their nearly 500,000 end-advertisers.” 

Clark joined the Tiger Pistol team from her previous role as Director of Customer Happiness at Volusion, where it was her mission to perfect the customer lifecycle and build mutually beneficial relationships, driving results for the company’s highest value customers and accounting for over $10M in annual recurring revenue. Ashley has also held leadership positions at Social Sentinel, where she handled the company’s most trusted partnerships to further advance the new frontier of safety in higher education. She holds an MPA from the University of Vermont.

“I am delighted to join the Tiger Pistol team and am looking forward to accelerating company growth with continual focus on advancing the knowledge and support of our Client Success Team,” said Clark. “The future of social advertising is bright with Tiger Pistol leading the way. Our team has already demonstrated their unwavering commitment to the success of our  clients’ businesses, and in combination with our innovative tech solution, our customers will not only thrive, but surpass their advertising goals. I’m greatly looking forward to working with some of the best and brightest in the industry to see what we can achieve together.”

Tiger Pistol’s dedicated Client Success  team provides go-to-market support, training, and onboarding, including a 24×7 multilingual help desk. Under Clark’s leadership, the team will build on Tiger Pistol’s industry-leading foundation – identifying and innovating ahead of our clients’ and end-advertisers’ social advertising needs. 

To learn more about Tiger Pistol’s social advertising tools and how Tiger Pistol, the world’s #1 social advertising automation platform for local, unlocks local activation at global scale for brands, resellers, and agencies visit www.tigerpistol.com. 

About Tiger Pistol 

Tiger Pistol is the world’s #1 social advertising automation platform for local. For nearly a decade, the company has been obsessively focused on building the world’s most effective social advertising platform for global brands, resellers, and agencies who realize the power of local activation at scale. As a preferred Facebook Marketing Partner and the largest third-party publisher of social advertising for local, Tiger Pistol creates, deploys, manages, and optimizes high-performance Facebook and Instagram ads at unprecedented scale, with over 800k Facebook and Instagram campaigns published to date. Tiger Pistol’s first of its kind technology delivers meaningful and measurable business impact for brands, resellers, and agencies alike, helping to unlock value and efficiency through innovation-led social advertising automation. Tiger Pistol has been recognized by Digiday as the Best Social Media Marketing Platform, and by Street Fight for Best Social Media Campaign. To learn more, call (888) 400-8845, visit TigerPistol.com, or follow on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Tiger Pistol Named U.S. Social Media Communications Award Finalist

Posted on by Tiger Pistol Marketing
Tiger Pistol’s Social Advertising Platform Recognized in Four Major Categories

Tiger Pistol, the only social advertising platform that delivers local activation at global scale, today announced that it has been shortlisted by the U.S. Social Media Communications Awards in four categories.

Best Use of Paid Social

Best Strategic Use of Social Media

Best Use of Facebook / Instagram

Best Social Media Campaign

The U.S. Social Media Awards celebrate the very best in U.S. social media and reward the individuals, companies and organizations who are using online platforms to communicate in fresh and innovative ways.

Winners will be announced at the U.S. Social Media Communications Awards Gala in March.

To learn more about how Tiger Pistol’s award-winning approach to social advertising at scale, request a demo today!
Tiger Pistol Furthers Investments, Outlines Goals for Data and Analytics

Tiger Pistol Furthers Investments, Outlines Goals for Data and Analytics

Posted on by Tiger Pistol Marketing

Focus on Surfacing Unique Customer Insights and Building New Features Around Data Science Backed Recommendations

To align with its efforts to better collect, present, and utilize data to show the real value of social advertising, Tiger Pistol, the only social advertising platform that delivers local activation at global scale, recently announced a series of data engineering hires to accelerate the continued evolution of the company’s data and analytics capabilities.

“As the advertising technology landscape becomes more competitive, the ability to integrate and better leverage data will become a key differentiator,” said Paul Elliott, CEO, Tiger Pistol. “More than 90% of all purchases are still made offline, yet most advertisers remain largely blind to the connectivity between their advertising and these offline transactions. Sure, data exists for phone calls, leads, and online traffic, but there remains a large void when it comes to tying digital advertising to the actual sale. The team at Tiger Pistol is working to solve that very problem by connecting social advertising through the Tiger Pistol platform to real world engagement.”

Leading Tiger Pistol’s Data and Analytics team is recently hired Senior Data Engineer Matt Liszewski. Liszewski comes to Tiger Pistol from Companion Labs, where he led efforts to analyze, optimize, and automate Facebook ad spend. Liszewski has 15-plus years’ experience architecting high performance APIs and data intensive applications with both distributed and local teams. He’s been involved in full software development life cycles including requirements gathering, design, development, testing, and support.

“Matt has spent the majority of his career tackling difficult business challenges through the application of technology, so he was the perfect fit to lead our Data Engineering team. In our quest to deliver more value and advanced capability to our clients, we have some tough industry challenges to solve, and I am confident that Matt will lead us there,” said Elliott. “We’re excited about adding Matt to the Tiger Pistol team and can’t wait to see the opportunities Matt’s efforts will unlock.”

Additionally, Darshan Pradhan was recently hired to work with Liszewski as a Senior Application Engineer. He comes with 15 years’ experience developing and architecting software systems at digital and social advertising companies focused on leveraging data and analytics to provide optimized results to marketers. He has previously worked with Liszewski at Knotice/IgnitionOne, where he helped develop a digital marketing and data management platform focused on utilizing first- and third-party data to deliver personalized dynamic content via email, SMS, and display, and at Companion Labs, where he helped maintain and enhance the Facebook Ads data intake process, as well as led the development on the Google Ads data intake.

“Darshan will be focused on helping establish data intake patterns for integrating third-party data sets into Tiger Pistol’s data and analytics feature,” said Liszewski. “He’ll be working closely with the Product Development team to integrate existing applications with the new analytics feature, introducing a new Reporting and Analytics API, and working on the integration of new third-party data sets.

The team will evolve Tiger Pistol’s data and analytics capabilities to fully unlock the potential of existing Facebook insights data, as well as allow for the easy integration of third-party data sets.

“By enhancing our data and analytics foundation, Tiger Pistol is now able to provide unique insights to its customers as well as introduce new features around data-science backed recommendations,” said Elliott. “This foundation will also allow the Tiger Pistol team to demonstrate clear value to current and prospective customers.”

To learn more about how Tiger Pistol, the world’s #1 social advertising automation platform for local, unlocks local activation at global scale for brands, resellers, and agencies contact us today.