Street Fight Daily: SMBs to Ramp Up Digital Marketing, Snap Adds Ad Targeting Based on Third-Party Data

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

Mobile Driving Marketing Spend Among SMBs (MediaPost)
Largely driven by their interest in mobile, 70% of small- and medium-sized businesses plan to up their digital marketing investments this year. Among that 70% share, half cited mobile as the main reason for their budget increases. 

6 Tools Brands Are Using to Stop Ads from Appearing on ‘Fake News’ Sites (Street Fight)
Fake news isn’t just a problem for consumers. It’s a problem that brand advertisers are facing, as well, as they struggle to ensure their display ads aren’t showing up alongside inflammatory online content. Here are six examples of tools that major brands are using right now to keep their ads off of disreputable sites.

Snapchat to Enable Offline Purchase Ad Targeting (Wall Street Journal)
Slowly but surely, Snap is starting to look a lot more like its competitors — at least when it comes to targeting people with ads using sophisticated data. The company has signed a deal with Oracle Data Cloud that will help marketers use data from offline purchases. AdWeek: Startup aims to get Snapchat users to pay for brands’ geofilters.

Street Culture: inMarket Retains a ‘Startup Mentality’ as It Scales Up (Street Fight)
“Startup culture doesn’t just mean a stocked kitchen with burritos in the freezer and tons of snacks in the kitchen, or jeans in the office,” says the company’s communications VP Dave Heinzinger. “It means everyone has the ability, from the CEO on down, to roll up their sleeves and really go to work on whatever needs to be done.”

Marketing-Mix Modeling: A Road of Missed Opportunities for Brands (AdExchanger)
Michael Collins: MMM is the well-used planning tool that helps brands determine where ad spend should be appropriated for campaigns. However, this singular channel-focused tool misses a profound amount of marketing opportunity and holistic insights into audience and ad campaign reach.

Wix Buys Flok to Add Loyalty and Mobile CRM to Its Business Tools (TechCrunch)
Wix, the website building platform with more than 98 million users globally, is making another acquisition to build out the tools that it offers to businesses and individuals that use its platform to build and maintain websites and mobile apps.

How AI Helps Marketers Invest in the Right Ads (VentureBeat)
Michael Green: With massive amounts of data, measurements, and algorithms to support its growth, AI is now finally in a stage where it can solve real-world specific problems much better than humans can across many domains. Media buying is no exception.

Scaled Back: Why Publishers Are Rethinking Their Pursuit of Huge Numbers (Digiday)
After years of focusing on scale, a number of publishers are retreating from it. While most still rely heavily on traffic generated from aggregation, or repurposing information published elsewhere, or highlighting trending content, newer publishers are either ignoring aggregation and fast-twitch tactics or using them far less.

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