Street Fight Daily: Walmart Grows As Advertising Platform, Amazon Paves Way for Alexa Everywhere

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Walmart Leverages In-Store Data to Grow as an Advertising Force (Digiday)
With around 140 million people shopping at its 5,000 stores in the U.S. every week, Walmart is not just a retail giant. It is also a growing advertising platform that touts its ability to connect online consumer behavior and a mountain of in-store sales data.

Street Culture: A New Way to Keep Score at CrowdOptic (Street Fight)
“The argument is, build a large company to be insanely great and change the world, right?” says CEO Jon Fisher. “As we operationalize the financial part, the path to making a real contribution in the world can be formulaic.”

Amazon Opens Up Access to Developer Tools for Adding Alexa to Commercial Products (TechCrunch)
Amazon wants to make its virtual assistant Alexa available on more devices, instead of just its own hardware. To that end, the company today is broadly opening up access to developer tools that will allow commercial device makers to build products powered by Alexa.

Facebook Is Giving Advertisers More Flexibility When Buying Mid-Roll Video Ads (AdWeek)
The social network announced it will let marketers choose whether to buy in-stream video placements on the Facebook Audience Network, within Facebook itself or to buy ads across all formats. 

Why Second-Party Data Is More Valuable than Third-Party (AdExchanger)
Ameet Shah: Sure, using third-party data is always an option, but it is often of an unknown quality and a commodity where the decent segments and individuals get overbought and overused. Second-party data is far more valuable but traditionally has been harder to activate and manage.

Kalanick Strikes Back at Benchmark, Calls Lawsuit ‘Shameful’ (The Verge)
Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has filed a response to Benchmark Capital’s fraud lawsuit against him, saying its claims depend substantially on “information and belief,” and not specific instances that detail fraud.

Email Re-Engagement, Reimagined (MediaPost)
April Mullen: We’ve all had them: the conversation with a colleague who says, “Why can’t we just keep sending campaigns to everyone in the email database? It can’t hurt, right?” Yes, it can. A lot. The good news is, there are approaches you can take to reawaken inactive subscribers on your list.

LBMA Podcast: Uniqlo, Joyful ATMs, Blippar and Google (Street Fight)
This Week in Location Based Marketing is a weekly video podcast from the Location Based Marketing Association with Asif Khan and Aubriana Lopez. On the show: xPressTap, Senior + Mall of America, Ford + RadiumOne Bluedot Innovation.

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