Street Fight Happenings
January Focus: Pursuing Privacy
As we straddle the precipice of a new year and a new decade, the next milestone in privacy legislation looms: the California Consumer Privacy Act. As California’s version of GDPR, it is the first major US privacy legislation. It will set a precedent and kick-start a domino effect for other states and may even lead to federal data privacy moves.
“Pursuing privacy” will be Street Fight’s editorial focus for the month of January. You may have noticed our monthly themes: December focused on the connected consumer, November’s focused on holiday shopping, October on local commerce verticals, and September on mapping (more on those in a bit).
December Focus: The Connected Consumer
When looking at several interlocking tech trends — wearables, IoT, smart devices, autonomous vehicles — one common thread emerges: our escalating connectivity as humans. All these technologies are increasingly melded with our senses as the computing “abstraction layer” diminishes.
In other words, device interfaces continue to get more intuitive and automatic. That can be seen in the progression of personal computing from UI milestones like the mouse to mobile-centric touch controls. Now, we have biometric tracking on the Apple Watch and ambient alerts to AirPods.
The “connected consumer” will be Street Fight’s editorial focus for the month of December.
Street Fight Unveils Innovator Award Winners
Street Fight’s charter is to educate the world on the innovation and best practices in local media, advertising, and commerce. And a key corollary to that mission is to recognize and award the innovators driving these sectors.
With that backdrop, today we officially announce the winners of the Street Fight Innovator Awards. Spanning 12 categories that represent the top battlegrounds in local commerce, winners embody the best of innovation and achievement in these areas (full list below).
Theme of the Month: Pursuing Privacy
6 Privacy Tools for CCPA Compliance
With the clock ticking on full enforcement of CCPA, businesses are looking at how they can get into compliance—and fast. Technology vendors have been quick to step in and fill that void, launching integrated privacy management platforms with CCPA and the European Union’s GDPR in mind. Most of these platforms can be configured to specific privacy regulations, helping businesses automate their data collection practices and regularly performing risk assessments to determine whether they’re handling personal data correctly.
Here are six examples of tools that companies can use to ensure CCPA compliance.
Telnet Passwords Leaked for Half a Million IoT Devices, Servers, Routers
The breach is particularly significant given the rapid expansion of smart or IoT devices. Given that consumers already struggle to secure basic electronic devices including laptops and smartphones, the Telnet breach indicates how much larger the security risk for personal devices may become in coming years as smart speakers, TVs, and fridges join the legion of devices open to hackers.
Roundtable: How Google’s Third-Party Cookie Announcement Will Disrupt Search, Ad Tech
Google indicated it is making the change to boost user privacy on the Web, and the company believes digital advertising can survive on the back of evolving, more privacy-aware data sources. Chief among those sources, at least in the case of Chrome, will be Google’s privacy sandbox, which will offer advertisers and ad tech companies personalization opportunities based on browser data without granting them direct access to user-level information.
To size up the impact of Google’s announcement on ad tech and hyperlocal marketing, we turned to a slate of industry professionals for their takes on the move.
Latest Posts
Mobile Marketing Firm Verve Acquired by Germany’s MGI
The companies underscored Verve’s location data-driven ability to drive prospective customers into brick-and-mortar stores, adding a cutting-edge ad tech capability to MGI’s suite of existing media solutions. Verve will also help the European enterprise increase its presence in North America.
6 Privacy Tools for CCPA Compliance
With the clock ticking on full enforcement of CCPA, businesses are looking at how they can get into compliance—and fast. Technology vendors have been quick to step in and fill that void, launching integrated privacy management platforms with CCPA and the European Union’s GDPR in mind. Most of these platforms can be configured to specific privacy regulations, helping businesses automate their data collection practices and regularly performing risk assessments to determine whether they’re handling personal data correctly.
Here are six examples of tools that companies can use to ensure CCPA compliance.
OTT Will Transform How Local Businesses Connect with Their Customers
When looking out into 2020 through a local media lens, advertisers trying to reach hyper-local audiences will continue to lean in and adopt more digital and over-the-top practices. No longer will businesses consider OTT an add-on to their media plans; rather, it will become the centerpiece to reach local audiences who are turning to free streaming services and apps to watch news and entertainment.
Here are our four top predictions for 2020.
Foot Traffic Data Shows Signs of Retail Apocalypse Can Speak to Smart Retail Strategy
Over the last year, we saw many well-known brands close their doors and scale back their offline footprints. While many believed this to be a sign of weakness, it was, in fact, a sign of a very effective corporate strategy.
Retailers such as Macy’s and Walmart both faced multiple closures in 2019, but when digging deeper and analyzing specific store locations, we uncover a much more informative narrative than simple brick-and-mortar decline.
Heard on the Street, Episode 43: Inferring User Intent with Viral Gains
One elusive component of effective marketing is knowing what consumers are thinking. But even with advances in AI, traditional ad targeting practices often commit basic errors like showing people the same ad several times … even though they may not be interested in any way in the product in question.
This is the area where Viral Gains is innovating. The latest guest on Street Fight’s Heard on the Street podcast, Viral Gains CEO Tod Loofbourrow tells us how his longstanding affinity for robotics and AI has influenced his path to solving this problem by better inferring intent and consumer sentiment.
Three Essential Steps toward Omnichannel Success
Consumers have limited time, detectable habits, and preferences about how they interact with brands. Marketers have become increasingly empowered to know and respond to these preferences on all channels.
As brands leverage opportunities offered by omnichannel marketing and further embrace the technology that unlocks each channel’s capabilities and insights, they will give customers the personal experiences they crave. Beginning the journey toward true omnichannel can be daunting, but the immense value it creates for both customers and brands far outweighs the rethinking, reinvention, and innovations it demands.
With Investment in Geo, Foursquare Focuses on Improving Data Access
When it comes to location data specifically, Senior VP of Product Josh Cohen is seeing Foursquare’s partners put more emphasis on the quality of data. The company’s partners are developing more sophisticated understandings of the range of data quality when it comes to location, which means Foursquare has to dedicate more resources to make sure new industry-wide expectations are met.
Crossing the B2B-B2C Divide: The Next Frontier in Customer Experience
In recent years, the marketing industry has started to discuss the increasingly blurry line between the disciplines of B2B and B2C marketing. For the most part, the conversation to date has been a discussion of tactics and methodologies—but this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Over the next five years, the breakdown between the B2B and B2C worlds will be dramatic, and the resulting marketing landscape—as well as people’s expectations for messaging—will look quite different than they do today. Let’s look at how this blurring line will soon vanish altogether.
Telnet Passwords Leaked for Half a Million IoT Devices, Servers, Routers
The breach is particularly significant given the rapid expansion of smart or IoT devices. Given that consumers already struggle to secure basic electronic devices including laptops and smartphones, the Telnet breach indicates how much larger the security risk for personal devices may become in coming years as smart speakers, TVs, and fridges join the legion of devices open to hackers.
Takeaways From ‘The Other CES 2020’ That Location-Minded Marketers Need to Know
CES provided a unique showcase for the importance of connected TV (CTV); it’s one of the few events that wrangles hardware, media, and advertising companies into the same place for a week. Within digital advertising, this topic is number one, and not outlining your strategy to support CTV in 2020 was a way to cut any CES meeting short. Companies that have moved from video to TV, such as Amobee or Telaria/Rubicon, exciting new combinations of TV and digital assets such as Xandr; programmatic TV leaders like The Trade Desk; and companies that have been long on TV for years such as Samba TV should have a fantastic 2020 ahead of them.
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OTT Will Transform How Local Businesses Connect with Their Customers