Street Fight Daily: Whole Foods Invests in Instacart, Ad Blocking Debate Gets Tempers Flaring
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Whole Foods to Invest in Instacart, Signs New Multi-Year Delivery Deal (Recode)
Whole Foods and Instacart are taking their relationship to the next level. The $10 billion national grocery store chain is making an investment in the four-year-old startup, and the companies have also signed a five-year partnership that makes Instacart the exclusive delivery partner for Whole Foods.
Fear, Loathing, and Opportunity On Display as Ad Industry Eyeballs Specter of Mobile Ad Blocking (TechCrunch)
A fractious panel on mobile ads brought several executives from the ad industry and Google face-to-face with what might be their worst nightmare: network-level mobile ad blocking. The session saw panelists arguing for more time to come up with ways to market content to people on mobile in a way they don’t hate.
Closing the Loop: PlaceIQ, LiveRamp Connect TV Campaigns With Location Visits (Street Fight)
PlaceIQ and LiveRamp have announced the results of a new consumer behavior model that connects TV to the real world. The companies conducted a number of campaigns delivering targeted TV ads and then used location data to measure real-world store visitations, resulting in an average lift of 46 percent across three targeted verticals.
Foursquare Won’t Be Facebook and That’s Just Fine, Crowley Says (Bloomberg)
Foursquare is not the next Facebook and that’s the way co-founder and Chairman Dennis Crowley likes it. “A lot of the old valuation baggage that we were carrying was tied to this idea that we have to become Facebook someday,” he said. The bulk of Foursquare’s revenue, which grew more than 100 percent last year, now comes from its B2B products.
GrubHub’s Chia: Scale and ‘Strong Partnership Model’ Keep Company Afloat in Saturated Market (Street Fight)
Competition in the local delivery space has exploded in the past few years, as on-demand providers rush to connect service providers with consumers as efficiently as possible. Street Fight recently caught up with GrubHub’s SVP of Operations, Stan Chia, who says the company’s fundamental mission — restaurant discovery — hasn’t changed.
Google’s Speedy Mobile Pages Are Now Showing Up in Search Results (The Next Web)
Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Google’s effort to help publishers speed up their sites, has gone live today, with the company quietly beginning to show results in searches.
6 Tools Local Merchants Can Use to Grow Their Email Lists (Street Fight)
Email marketing is cheap and effective, but it isn’t always easy for small businesses. For local merchants, the toughest part about email marketing can be generating a list of engaged subscribers. Here are six examples of tools that can grow those lists.
Nielsen Looks to Fill Ecommerce Void With Direct Retailer Data (AdAge)
Nielsen is looking to fill the ecommerce data void with the first syndicated sales measurement service to get at least some of its information directly from retailers. “The combination of this retailer data with consumer-sourced receipts provides an incredible data set from which to calibrate and project a total ecommerce channel,” said Karen Fichuk, Nielsen’s president-North America.
Marketers Can Now Buy Keyword-Based Mobile Ads for 100 Million Worldwide Locations (Adweek)
xAd has unveiled a new ad-buying tool called MarketPlace built off of data from 100 million locations the company has collected through its Blueprints and Footprints products in recent years. Similar to a website, each location is tagged with keywords — “fast food lovers,” “car dealerships,” or, more precisely, “KFC stores” and “BMW lots” — that marketers buy to target specific groups of consumers with mobile ads.
Can Technology Save Journalism? (Forbes)
Brian O’Kelly: The problem isn’t that the Internet is killing journalism, but rather that it’s killing print advertising. Here are three considerations for outlets’ digital reinvention and survival: disaggregation and distribution, user experience, and differentiation and data.
Google Just Showed Me the Future of Indoor Navigation (The Verge)
Tom Warren: Most of Google’s Project Tango will be crowdsourced data, just like Waze collects traffic data. It’s still early days, despite Google experimenting with the tech for a couple of years now, but if more smartphone makers get behind Google’s vision, we might all finally be navigating indoors soon.
Get Street Fight Daily in your inbox! Subscribe to our newsletter.
