Street Fight Daily: Comcast-backed Firm Bets $250M on Groupon, OOH Advertising’s ‘Renaissance’

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

Comcast-Backed Firm Makes $250 Million Investment in Groupon (Bloomberg)
A firm backed by Comcast has invested $250 million with online marketplace Groupon, creating a partnership that could bolster Comcast’s local advertising business. Groupon will use the proceeds to repurchase its shares, which rose after the investment became public.

Technology Fuels Renaissance in Out-of-Home Advertising (AdAge)
Marketers are linking online data to digital billboards, producing ads that bridge the digital and real worlds. Audience-measurement techniques relying on mobile devices are giving brands a better grasp on what types of people encounter their signs every day. As a result, OOH advertising is drawing a steady stream of dollars even as other forms of traditional advertising lose ground to digital.

Google Finally Reveals How to Improve Your Local Ranking (Street Fight)
Google has significantly updated its help page on the topic of local ranking to include, for the first time, specific common-sense guidelines showing businesses how they can increase the likelihood that online searchers will find them in Google Maps on desktop and mobile.

Why Contextual Commerce Is the Next Big Thing (Nasdaq)
Karen Webster: Many platforms are taking the concept of contextual commerce to the edge, leveraging their powerful closed ecosystems that, with payments embedded inside of them, extend commerce into the places where consumers want to take it — rather than the other way around.

7 Smart Ways to Deliver Loyalty Rewards Based on Buying Patterns (Street Fight)
Hyperlocal vendors are increasingly marketing their high-tech loyalty programs at small and mid-size businesses, with easier ways for business owners to deliver loyalty rewards based on data captured through point-of-sale. Here are seven ways merchants can use purchasing behaviors to offer more relevant rewards.

Does Google Stand a Chance Against Facebook in Mobile Display? (Marketing Land)
Facebook has been steadily building up its ad tech, directly challenging Google. These moves, coupled with the introduction of native ad formats that appear on Facebook’s mobile news feeds, have propelled it past Google to become the leading seller of display advertising worldwide, and most estimates peg Facebook as the leader in display for the foreseeable future. Can Google catch up?

Stae Wants to Prepare Cities for the Future (TechCrunch)
Cities are becoming denser and facing bigger challenges, but innovation with local impact is coming from private companies, and these companies subsequently have better insights about how cities work. Enter Stae, a startup that aims to build a platform that facilitates the working together of local governments and tech companies.

Amazon Takes On PayPal with Expanded Payments-Processing Service (Los Angeles Times)
Amazon has announced an expansion of its payments service that will make “Pay with Amazon” an option for sellers who set up their websites through ecommerce platforms created by companies that help mostly smaller merchants build and run their online stores.

Target’s Savings App Now Lets You Clip Real Coupons (TechCrunch)
Target’s app Cartwheel is becoming more useful to those looking to save money at checkout. The company said the app has been updated to support digital coupons from manufacturers, meaning shoppers can save dollars on a wider range of products.

Report Suggests Mobile Helping Revive Some Traditional Media (LSA Insider)
Greg Sterling: Buried in comScore’s recent “Cross-Platform Future in Focus” report is a chart showing that mobile usage is helping newspaper publishers and magazines grow their audiences, sometimes significantly. There are a number of stories of publications that came back from near death through digital.

More Than Two-Thirds of U.S. Digital Display Ad Spending Is Bought Programmatically (eMarketer)
In 2016, U.S. programmatic digital display ad spending will reach $22.10 billion, a jump of 39.7 percent over last year. That represents 67 percent of total digital display ad spending in the U.S.

Google+ Accounts No Longer Required for Leaving Local Reviews on Google (Search Engine Land)
Google has removed the Google+ account requirement for those leaving reviews on local businesses within Google Maps. In addition, Google has updated the user interface for adding reviews while in the search results screen.

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