Qualifying and Quantifying 2020’s E-commerce Surge

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Spending hasn’t declined — it’s just shifted. One of the themes we’re seeing is that the standouts of 2020 are those who have shifted with it. We’re talking here about a broad definition of e-commerce — not just ordering things online, but any digital or mobile purchase.

For example, in local commerce, these digital fulfillment models include mobile order-ahead functions in QSR and coffee. They also include curbside pickup for physical goods. And in an even broader sense (and looking forward), they will include touchless or cashier-less retail in a post-Covid era of physical retail.

Heard on the Street, Episode 58: Gamifying Digital Advertising

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The appetite for gaming has inspired ad tech players to maximize interactivity through, among other methods, the gamification of advertising. Gamification and other interactive features can breed deeper levels of engagement, response, and brand recall.

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What’s Snapchat’s Local Play?

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Snap continues to make moves in local commerce. Historic steps include geo-filters, while more recent activity includes Local Lenses and business listings in Snap Map. These features are notable on their own, but they get more interesting when you view them together and extrapolate to Snap’s local road map.

For example, Snap has more 13-34-year-olds active than any other channel, including Facebook and Instagram. This essentially means Snap can offer SMBs incremental and non-duplicated reach to an attractive audience.

Google’s Latest Privacy Play Has Big Implications for the Open Web

Connecting the Dots on Google’s Visual Road Map

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Google continues to double down on visual search and navigation. Its latest move came last week with updates to its Live View visual navigation to help users identify and qualify local businesses. This follows soon after its Earth Cloud Anchors that will let users create digital content on physical places.

Both developments tell us something about what may well be the future of local search: augmented reality-enhanced visuals.

Heard on the Street, Episode 57: Streamlining the Digital Ad Stack

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What can one learn through a combination of the Peace Corps, CPA training, and the ad tech world? On Street Fight’s Heard on the Street Podcast, we often talk about the virtues of “cross-training” in a given career path. Perhaps no one embodies that principle more than VRTCAL founder Todd Wooten.

Self-Serve Restaurant Ordering in a Post-Covid World

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We expect to see a continued rise in touchless retail shopping and contactless transactions à la Amazon Go Stores.

But one of the less-discussed technologies in the Covid-advantaged bucket is self-serve mobile restaurant ordering. The idea is that ordering and paying from your table can reduce server interaction — which has Covid and non-Covid benefits considering it can save diners’ lives and their time.

Street Fight’s October Theme: Home for the Holidays

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Entering Q4 means many things, but to us it points to the media and commerce world’s annual culmination. That’s right — in this time warp of a year, we’re entering the holidays. Considering the oddities of 2020, what will this year’s holiday season look like? We know for sure it will not be normal.

Answering that question will be Street Fight’s October editorial focus. Branded with the cheeky title “Home for the Holidays,” (title credit: Damian Rollison), this month’s focus will be defining the holiday shopping dynamics of a socially distanced and sheltered-in-place world. What will be different?

3 Technologies to Support Retail’s Touchless Era

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When we return to shopping in physical stores, will that look different? It’s hard to imagine there will be as much much merchandise handling as before. Will it be a “touchless” environment? And if so, which technologies will power the touchless future?

Let’s dive into a few candidates.

Triangulating Apple Maps: The Tech Angle

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Apple surprised the local search world last month when it announced local business reviews in Maps. Similar to its other search-based efforts, Apple formerly relied on partners like Yelp for local listings and reviews. But now, as part of its broader data-driven Maps overhaul, it will phase in original content.

Much has been written about this within the local search publishing world and analyst corps, including my colleague Stephanie Miles’ article on how brands can prepare for Apple Maps reviews here on Street Fight. So in the interest of treading new ground, what less-discussed clues lie in Apple’s recent mapping moves that can triangulate its direction?

Heard on the Street, Episode 56: Diversifying the Digital Ad Stack

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Digilant offers a multi-faceted service model that both diversifies its market opportunity and mitigates its risk as a player in the ever-shifting advertising world.

This multi-faceted approach includes interlocking pieces such as ad tech software, agency services, and consultancy services. These can be mixed and matched in various ways. For example, clients can use Digilant’s software for in-house brand marketing work or rely on the company as more of a full-service agency.

Street Fight’s September Theme: Mapping the Future

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What does “Mapping the Future” entail? As a primary tool for consumer local search and discovery, mapping continues to undergo UX innovations and structural changes. We’ll examine these areas as well as mapping’s interplay with local search and SEO strategies.

Though mapping is more of a Street Fight staple than a trending topic, market signals indicate that the timing is right. In fact, we already got started last month with a look at Snapchat’s moves into local mapping — not just UX upgrades to Snap Map but also self-serve advertising for local businesses.

Earnings Season Teases Retail’s Next Normal

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Earnings results that rolled out from retail giants over the past week further demonstrate what our next normal will look like. Specifically, Walmart and Target both hit record numbers. This is partly a function of Covid-era circumstances, but it is also due to each retailer’s active e-commerce momentum.

The earnings validate consumer acclimation to digitally infused local shopping. What’s more, other retailers and down-market businesses will look to replicate this success. This can all therefore be viewed as a leading indicator for retail’s next normal.

Snapchat’s “Promote Local Place”: The Deeper Dive

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Snapchat’s 200 million users can now use Snap Map to find businesses in addition to finding friends. These two activities can go hand in hand if friends are discovered nearby on the map when users are planning local adventures.

But what matters most for local is that Snap will now let businesses promote themselves in the map interface, adding a key option for local advertising. This will happen on a self-serve basis for both SMBs and multi-location brands.

Heard on the Street, Episode 55: Location Intelligence’s New Normal

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Location intelligence is expanding beyond its well-known uses for advertising (ad targeting, attribution, etc.), supporting enterprises in a number of other ways. That includes supply chain management as well as decisions about where to open another store location.

All of the above applications of location intelligence are fueling UberMedia, our latest guest on Street Fight’s Heard on the Street podcast. UberMedia CEO Gladys Kong says that this expansion of location data’s utility was already underway but has accelerated in the Covid era.

Street Fight’s August Theme: The Next Normal

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As we roll into August, it’s time to establish Street Fight’s monthly editorial focus. After our standard ritual (no animals harmed), we’ve settled on “The Next Normal.” Forced to adopt new technologies just to survive, some local businesses have experienced a decade of evolution in just a few months.

So the question is, how will newly elevated local businesses transform the local commerce landscape? If a large share of the local business universe has raised its game, what will be the new “bar” in local media, advertising, and commerce? How should tech providers adjust to new demand signals?

Can a Pandemic Inflect Local Commerce Tech? Part II

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What about the tech adoption accelerants happening on the supply side? Tech giants who provide marketing and operational tools for local businesses have been in hyperdrive over the past few months to roll out new Covid-era features.

Here are three areas where we’re seeing the most activity … and where we could correspondingly see the most local business evolution.

Apple and Snap Signal Local AR Commerce Ambitions

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Recent announcements from Snap and Apple at their respective developer conferences point to future connections between AR and local commerce.

Snap’s Local Lenses will let developers create geo-anchored persistent content that Snap users can discover through the camera interface. This will also include the ability for users to leave persistent AR graphics for friends to discover. The use case that Snap has promoted is more about fun and whimsy, including “painting” the world with digital and expressive graffiti. But the development could also include local storefront information.

Moving on to Apple, it similarly continues to show its AR aspirations. The latest is GeoAnchors for ARkit, announced at WWDC.  These evoke AR’s location-based potential by letting users plant and discover spatially anchored graphics that are persistent across sessions and users.

Heard on the Street, Episode 54: Augmenting Local Commerce

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AR’s impact on local is playing out in many ways, including Google’s “internet of places” aspirations to let you point your phone at storefronts to reveal information like business details and reviews. It’s also happening in brand advertising activations to let consumers visualize products in 3D through mobile AR interfaces.

M7 founder Matt Maher tells us there are several advantages to this new flavor of brand marketing. AR’s immersion creates strong consumer engagement, which can be seen in metrics like session lengths. In-store activations mean lower-funnel impact near the point of purchase.

Street Fight’s July Theme: Targeting Location

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After huddling with the editorial team about our July theme, we all agreed that it could be time to mix it up a bit. So we’re returning to a meat-and-potatoes theme in our lineup: Targeting Location. This will allow us to talk about something else while acknowledging Covid-19’s still rampant status.

What do we mean by “Targeting Location?” A central issue for location-based media and commerce, this is the moving target of how to pinpoint and optimize strategies around device location. It includes topics like location-targeted ads, building audience profiles, attribution, paid search, and location data strategies.

Heard on the Street, Episode 53: Pioneering Audio Out-of-Home

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We’ve all heard of out-of-home advertising: staples such as billboards and subway ads. Audio is one of the oldest forms of advertising, from terrestrial radio to pandora. Shopper marketing has been around for decades to steer in-store shoppers with last-mile messaging.

These are all common staples of local advertising. But combine them, and you may have something interesting. This combination of OOH, audio, and shopper marketing is what Vibenomics calls audio out-of-home. It gives retailers a way to more intelligently monetize the soundwave inventory in their locations through targeted messaging.