Street Fight Daily: Google Offers Goes for Loyalty, Groupon Hiring Engineers
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.
Google Closing the Loop With New ‘Offer Rewards’ Program (Marketing Land)
Greg Sterling: Google is testing a more comprehensive approach to offline purchase tracking that involves consumers registering a credit card to receive automatic rewards — thereby enabling tracking from the online promotion to offline redemption. The program is called “Google Offers with Rewards.” It’s an extension of the current Google Offers program.
Groupon Is Hiring an Army of Engineers in Silicon Valley (Business Insider)
Groupon, which already has about 200 engineers working out of its Palo Alto office, is looking to hire as many as 100 more, boosting the Chicago-based company’s headcount out West, the company tells us. Groupon is going to host a big recruiting event for the office later this spring. The company is already buying billboards along the highways running from San Francisco to the South Bay.
Behind the Slowdown in Local Advertising (Media Life)
Removing digital from the equation, traditional local media would grow at a rate of a mere 0.2 percent the next four years. BIA/Kelsey chief economist Mark Fratrik talks to Media Life about why local advertising fell last year, why he revised his forecast downward, and what to expect from local digital advertising over the next few years.
The Voice of the Customer: Can You Hear It Through the Screaming? (Directions Mag)
Deriving location intelligence from unstructured data such as tweets, Facebook messages or Foursquare check-ins presents challenges for the producers of consumer goods. But these new “voices of the customer” reveal valuable clues for merchandising and site selection. Jim Stone, principal of Chain Store Advisors, tells us about new technology with the computational power for “sensemaking” from social media, suggesting that traditional customer analysis needs to be revisited.
Pontiflex Becomes an Entirely Mobile Business, Launches New Self-Serve Ad Platform for Small Businesses (Business Insider)
Pontiflex, a Brooklyn-based ad network founded in 2008, has launched a mobile self-serve ad platform called AdLeads. A few hundred small businesses in and national advertisers in a dozen countries already use the system. About 20,000 more are backlogged. It’s a cost per signup model rather than cost per click.
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