A New Era for Street Fight

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Usually you come to Street Fight for the best news and commentary in local marketing and tech — but today we’ve got some news of our own.

After nearly six years as a bootstrapped independent business, Street Fight has been acquired by Brandify, the Anaheim-based multi-location digital marketing platform for brands — and we couldn’t be more excited. The pairing will provide the resources to significantly expand Street Fight’s content, events, and research, and will allow us to launch new offerings that will create greater value for companies across the industry.

In many ways, this is the culmination of Street Fight’s work over the past years getting closer with the key players fighting for market share in local marketing and technology. When we first launched Street Fight in 2011, the industry was full of promise — with millions of dollars pouring into startups like Groupon, Patch, Foursquare, Yelp and others that were set to disrupt local tech.

In the intervening time, we’ve published over 5,200 articles on our site and released six major research papers, hosted seventeen industry conferences in the U.S. and abroad, and connected with thousands of executives transforming the local ecosystem. We’ve innovated around our events, with topic-specific conferences like our Local Data Summit, and intimate invite-only executive retreats. You could say that, as the companies in the industry have grown from tiny startups to fledgling players to major revenue generators, Street Fight’s progress has tracked with it.

We’re gratified to find a home within a dynamic company like Brandify that will now allow us to grow faster, add new staff, and unlock more of Street Fight’s potential as a resource and community for the companies in this space. Brandify has consistently been a top thought leader in local, and the partnership will allow the company to forge deeper ties with the new ideas and emerging companies that will continue to shape the industry going forward. And we’re thrilled to work with Manish Patel, the founder and CEO of Brandify, who first launched Brandify as Where2GetIt during the dot-com bubble with a store locator, among the first of its kind.

Our history with Brandify stretches back several years as we’ve helped to extend their profile into the marketplace through conference sponsorships and the Brand Battle series. We’ve been impressed by their deep commitment to innovation in local and found an easy rhythm to our dynamic with them. As they have begun moving into producing their own conferences and more content, there seemed to be potential in coming together.

For us, this partnership not only gives us more resources to expand our offerings for the local industry, it also gives us greater insight into just how the industry works. 

You can look for us to significantly expand our coverage of enterprise in local and bring more brands and agencies into the mix, to complete the ecosystem of sellers and buyers. Brands will be a major focus in June when we re-launch our signature NYC event to bring you The Best Street Fight Summit Evera three-day extravaganza in Brooklyn that will expand upon the success of our popular one-day industry events. We’ll also be adding smaller regional events to connect the buy-side with the sell-side and bring more people into our community; an “upfronts” event aimed at showcasing the best in emerging local tech; as well as more intimate executive retreats.

We’ll also be lending support to Brandify for their customer events, and continuing to produce thought leadership content, such as the Brand Battle series. In turn, Brandify will be educating us and helping us reach into the enterprise market.

Crucially, Street Fight will remain completely independent in its editorial and partnerships. This means that Street Fight alone makes all the calls on whom to feature and how and when. We will continue to adhere to the high standards that you have come to expect in our content, research, and event programming — and we will continue to have a “Chinese wall” separating our editorial and event programming from the business side. When we partner with a company that is not Brandify, we will treat that relationship and those agreements with the same degree of excellence and confidentiality that we have since our inception. We greatly value the community that we’ve built around the ideas and analysis in Street Fight, and we plan to continue do everything we can to maintain the trust you’ve placed in us as an information source.  

At this critical juncture in our history, we’re deeply indebted to the many staffers, investors, consultants and columnists who have done so much to make the company what it has become. These include David Card, Stephanie Miles, Tom Grubisich, Steven Jacobs, Rick Robinson, Joe Zappa, Larry Kramer, Steve Hawk, Brian Dengler, Jeff Lundwall, Warren Kay, Robin Liss, Kira Spivak, Justin Konrad, Alex Salkever, April Nowicki, Annie Melton, Geoff Michener, Damian Rollison, Asif Khan, Charity Huff, Eric Owen, Mike Boland, John Wickersham, Rick Blair, Amory Bennett, Noah Davis, Noah Elkin, Kendra Wiig, and Sara Clemence (and, of course, many others).  

It’s a changing time for B2B media companies. New models are emerging, and B2B information companies like ours are now more frequently being scooped up by smart industry players. Having served you for six years, we’re now embarking on a new journey and are excited to show you what this new pairing can do.

— Laura and David