Street Fight Daily: Users Stand by Uber Despite Scandals, FTC Clears Amazon-Whole Foods Deal

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

Despite the Drama, Uber Reports Strong User Growth and Financial Outlook (TechCrunch)
Uber’s $8.7 billion in gross bookings were up 17 percent in the second quarter. Global trips increased 150 percent year-over-year, excluding China. Adjusted net revenue was $1.75 billion in the second quarter, up from $1.5 billion in the first quarter. 

Amazon-Whole Foods Deal Clears Last Two Major Hurdles (NYT)
Amazon’s bid to become a bigger player in the grocery business took a major step forward Wednesday, as federal antitrust regulators approved the internet company’s acquisition of Whole Foods Market. Medium: Foursquare’s Jeff Glueck on predicting which companies Amazon and Walmart will acquire next.

Facebook Has a New Mission That Just May Benefit Local Publishers (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: Facebook doesn’t call itself a technology company anymore. “It’s a “new kind of platform,” says founder Mark Zuckerberg. But I think the world – in particular local news publishers — should forget the semantics and focus instead on what Facebook is actually doing.

Paid-Search Advertising Still Outranks Social in Performance (MediaPost)
Although they struggle to keep up with new tech, marketers repeatedly test campaigns to find the media returning the highest profit on investments. When it comes to pay-per-click advertising, paid-search text ads remain the best performer for marketers.

Case Study: Audiologist Offloads Management of Digital Campaigns (Street Fight)
Audiology First owner Diana Wagner knew that establishing a presence online would be essential to growing her business, but running online marketing campaigns required too much day-to-day involvement for her to be able to handle everything on her own.

TGI Fridays Aims to Reinvent Itself through IoT and Chabots (CIO)
Sherif Mityas, TGI Fridays CIO and vice president for strategy and brand initiatives, is testing new technologies in a mock restaurant that serves as a launching pad for digital tools that could redefine casual dining in a world where more millennials cook at home or order from quick-service chains. 

How Huge Is Personalizing the Café Experience (Digiday)
The store of the future may still be a pipe dream, but some marketers are discovering that the power of customer data isn’t limited to digital spaces. To learn just how personalized the physical retail experience could get, Huge built a cafe at the base of its Atlanta office.

Defining Reach in the Age of Microtargeting (AdExchanger)
Bryan Noguchi: Our industry is nearing an amazing inflection point where “reach,” as we’ve traditionally understood it, is about to be replaced with an as-yet-unnamed metric representing “the right people, at the right time, in the right mindset.”

Consumers Turn to Social Media to Voice Complaints with Brands (eMarketer)
Data from social media analytics and monitoring service Sprout Social revealed that many US internet users believe social media has given them more of a voice to expose unfair treatment from brands and be more critical of them in general.

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