Street Fight Daily: Uber and Didi Close $35B Deal, Most Businesses Still Lack Mobile Strategy

Share this:

Uber-App

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

Uber Sells China Operations to Didi After Losing Billions (Bloomberg)
Didi Chuxing, the dominant ride-hailing service in China, said it will acquire Uber Technologies Inc.’s operations in the country, ending a battle that cost the two companies billions as they competed for customers and drivers. Didi will buy Uber’s brand, business and data in the country, the Chinese company said in a statement. Financial Times: Uber to pour $500 million into global mapping project.

Survey: Demand for Multichannel Programmatic is Promising (Street Fight)
David Card: Nearly one-third of the respondents in Street Fight’s survey who also said that local media and content was important for their marketing were thinking about such cross-channel programmatic. Interest appeared highest for marketers who found local TV effective, but also played strongly with radio and print fans.

Even as Mobile Gobbles Up Web Traffic, 80% of Businesses Lack Long-Term Mobile Strategies (AdWeek)
Only 20 percent of companies have a mobile marketing strategy that extends into the next 12 months, per a report from Adobe today. However, if one digs deeper into Adobe’s survey, which entailed 4,000 marketers and digital decision makers across the globe, those numbers may flip-flop in the coming years. For instance, 63 percent of brands believe the quality of their mobile experience is more important than that of their desktop experience.

7 Retention Marketing Platforms for SMBs (Street Fight)
As small and mid-size businesses move away from the once-ubiquitous daily deals platforms, they’re now funneling a great portion of their budgets toward retention marketing solutions. Here are eight examples digital platforms, each taking a unique approach to customer retention.

Excited about Google’s New Map Ads? You Should Be! (Search Engine Land)
Will Scott: Google Maps ads are changing to help local businesses bolster their visibility. These are the four features business owners and consumers should be most excited about.

Marketers Root for Verizon as It Chases the Google-Facebook Duopoly (AdAge)
Advertisers desperately want an alternative to the digital powers of Facebook and Google. That’s why they cheered Verizon’s deal to buy Yahoo for $4.8 billion. Marketers want a more open partner than Google or Facebook, which use brands’ data for targeting but return little to apply elsewhere.

U.S. Marketers to Step Up Social Video Ads, Especially on Facebook (eMarketer)
According to the data, within the next 12 months, 70.8% of respondents said they plan to invest in social video ads, including ads to boost content. And Facebook is most likely to benefit from this objective; 65.8% of those who planned to do social video advertising planned to use it.

In Cincinnati, a Local TV Station Sets Out to Build a Full-Fledged Digital Newsroom (Columbia Journalism Review)
An editorial board. An editor-in-chief. A staff editorial cartoonist and a high school sports beat writer. A revenue stream that combines both advertising dollars and subscribers. Those sound like classic elements of a major metropolitan newspaper. But the description also applies to WCPO, the Scripps-owned television station in Cincinnati that has been experimenting, under the watchful eyes of industry observers, with a full-fledged local digital news operation.

In-Store Screens Read Consumers’ Faces to Deliver Targeted Content (MediaPost)
Although our smartphones, PCs and TVs can’t yet read our genders, ages and emotions to deliver targeted content, that time is already here. Fully Aware and Responsive In-Store Technology (FARIS), embodied in a system called eyeQinsights, can offer at least four different lifestyle images depending on whether the target is male or female and older or younger than about 35.

Get Street Fight Daily in your inbox! Subscribe to our newsletter.

Tags: