Street Fight Daily: Yahoo Says Verizon May Ditch Deal, Branded Content on Mobile Sees Success
roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Yahoo Raises Possibility Verizon May Back Out… Click-Through-Rates for Branded Content on Mobile Double That on Desktop… LinkedIn Makes It Easier for Businesses to Send Sponsored Direct Messages….
Mobile 1.0 Had Its Own Uber: Recalling the Birth of the Future
Somewhere in the nascent days of flip-phones, when I headed up AOL’s mobile products division, we came across a little company with an ambitious goal: let people hail a cab or black car virtually using their cellphones. The company, Qsent, had been working on a mobile-phone version of a service called iQtaxi.
How Retailers Are Personalizing the Shopping Experience This Holiday Season
The biggest story this holiday shopping season isn’t expected to be any specific toy or garment that’s flying off the shelves, but the way consumers are being recognized and how they’re finding the products they ultimately purchase when they shop inside physical stores. With holiday retail sales expected to increase just 1.8% this year, retailers […]
Snapchat, Uber, and the Implications of Machine Learning
Machine learning and predictive analytics need to meld seamlessly with core app functionality. The technology needs to “just work,” without steep learning curves or frustrating dead ends. So I’d expect any company who experiments with machine learning for local search to start with a simple set of problems and hone the user experience.
The Accelerating Consolidation of the Digital Ad Market
“The flow of dollars from businesses of all sizes has clearly been away from lower-performance niche platforms into boosted Facebook posts,” writes David Mihm. “We can debate the value of that activity, but relative to the questionable/delayed/opaque performance of so many digital ad products, Facebook seems to have found a sweet spot.”
Voice Search Profoundly Changes the Way Consumers Interact on Mobile
Sponsoered content: Business listings are an important part of voice searches, particularly when “near me” searches are involved. Localized searches may see an even more rapid shift to voice than other searches, based on consumers’ increasing comfort with using hands-free devices in the car or when their eyes are otherwise occupied while outside the home.
Street Fight Daily: Facebook-WhatsApp Data Sharing Blocked Abroad, OpenTable Scales Back
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Runs Into Roadblock Abroad Taking User Data from WhatsApp for Targeted Ads… As OpenTable Struggles to Take Hold Abroad, Priceline Scales It Back… Uber Rival Karhoo Shuts Down After Blowing Reported $250M in Funding…
Report: Airports Could Be the Next Big Beacon Hubs
In U.S airports, we don’t see as much beacon activity as we might expect, but a new report by Unacast’s proximity marketing network service, Proxbook, indicates that by 2019, 84% of all global airports will be involved in a deployment or a trial project with beacons or other proximity sensors.
Street Fight Daily: Google Begins Mobile-First Indexing, Apple News Drives Traffic for Pubs
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Begins Mobile-First Indexing, Using Mobile Content For All Search Rankings… Apple News Drives Significant Traffic for Some Publishers, But Measurement Remains Iffy… The Economist Turns to LinkedIn over Pinterest and Tumblr…
LBMA Podcast: Sam’s Club, Pizza Hut, and IHG’s Sasha Trifunac
This Week in Location Based Marketing is a weekly video podcast from the Location Based Marketing Association with Asif Khan and Aubriana Lopez. On the show: Smart Water + Proxama, Google’s OTTO, InContext + Intel Capital, Tesco, LinkNYC to UK, Sue Bee Honey & InMarket, Bank of America, and Groupon buys Living Social.
Street Fight Daily: Brands Leverage Apple Search Ads, Yelp Struggles Internationally
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Big Brands Are Already Targeting Their Competitors with Apple Search Ads… Yelp, Struggling Internationally, Lays Off 175 In Sales and Marketing… Foursquare Licenses Drawbridge’s Cross-Device Identity Data for Location Intelligence…
This Holiday Season, Brands Need to Pay Special Attention to Data Details
Many brands are already breaking out holiday decorations, hoping to attract the efficient crowds this early in the season. But glittery ornaments and fake snow only goes so far: 30% of local search users have cited “inaccurate” information as the issue they most frequently experience, and Google’s “near me” searches have increased 34-fold since 2011. Once the Brandify 360° Network completes initial listing corrections, the solution provides additional insights and value, such as pinpointing where online traffic originates from for specific listings and automating details to save time and energy for management.
Reimagining the Mobile Banner: In-App Ad Innovation Spares Brands from Google’s Interstitial Pinch
The future of our work is about designing smarter ways to reach users, so we need to focus on ways to drive engagement, not distraction. And that means finding subtle things that trigger the meaningful interactions. This isn’t 1999; we’re not building banners for last century’s desktop.
So, as January 10 approaches, let’s look at some creative models from the app side of the table
At Hearst Newspapers, a New Digital Strategy to End ‘Flying Blind’
Just how far local newspapers have to go to plant their flag commandingly in the fiercely competitive world of digital is summed up in a revealing story told by Robertson (Rob) Barrett, the new digital chief at Hearst Newspapers, who says that editors just don’t have information about the interests of the people in their market.
Street Fight Daily: Uber Redesigns App to Facilitate Location-Sharing, Yext Launches Developer Platform
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Uber Redesigns App to Streamline Ride Ordering, Facilitate Location-Sharing… Yext Launches a Developer Platform for Its Location Database Technology… Facebook Shares Sink as Company Announces Ad Revenue Growth Likely to Slow…
Just How Big a Deal Are Voice Search and Chatbots for Local?
At Street Fight Summit we raised a little controversy around the potential disruptiveness of voice search to the hyperlocal economy. Street Fight believes voice search is a critical emerging technology, a view that seemingly contrasts with that of many companies on the supply side of hyperlocal.