Street Fight Daily: Postmates Sheds Employees, What Oath CEO Learned from Leading Patch

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

Postmates Laid Off All Its Cities Managers This Week (TechCrunch)
TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Postmates has let go of all of its city managers, as it centralizes some of its operations at its headquarters in San Francisco. The total number of people affected by the move is 15 across markets.

GTCR Acquires Majority Stake in Simpli.fi (Street Fight)
GTCR, a Chicago-based private equity firm, has acquired a majority stake in Simpli.fi, a programmatic advertising platform that helps brands master local marketing at scale. The Simpli.fi management team, headed up by co-founders Frost Prioleau and Paul Harrison, will remain in charge of the company’s operations.

What Oath CEO Tim Armstrong Learned from Patch’s Struggles (Recode)
Armstrong founded Patch in 2007, and when he became AOL’s CEO, he acquired it in 2009. Until majority ownership of the company was sold to Hale Global in 2014, he weathered constant doubt and criticism from both investors and the media over the brand’s losses.

At Liftoff, a Classic Formula for Company Culture (Street Fight)
It’s never too early to be intentional about establishing and promoting the key values you want your team to emulate, says Liftoff’s CEO Mark Ellis. It provides a set of criteria against which to assess candidates from a cultural fit perspective, as well as a rationale for promoting certain employee behaviors and discouraging others.

Amazon Pumps Resources into Alexa to Maintain Dominance as Competition Heats Up (WSJ)
Amazon.com Inc. is pouring more resources into Alexa to maintain its edge as competition heats up among artificial-intelligence assistants, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. Digiday: Inside Amazon’s pitch to agencies

Best Buy Grows Its Same-Day Delivery to Fight Back Against Amazon (Business Insider)
The electronics retailer will offer same-day shipping in 27 cities in the US. That’s double the number of cities available previously and includes San Diego, Denver, Austin, and Tampa. By the end of the year, the company expects the service will expand to 40 cities.

Facebook Avoids a Wash as CPGs Scour the Digital Supply Chain (AdExchanger)
Consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands are threatening steep investment pullbacks if higher standards aren’t met on marketing measurement and transparency. But these changes haven’t affected Facebook — even if CPGs as a whole are pulling digital spend, there are some important nuances.

Why Microsites Aren’t Always Ideal for SEO (Search Engine Land)
Janet Driscoll Miller: There are definitely times when having separate sites makes sense from a brand perspective. But there are also several reasons you may want to reconsider splitting your website into multiple microsites.

An Important Kind of Transparency for Advertising (MediaPost)
Marc Guldimann: Just over a year ago, in July 2016, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) dropped a bomb on the advertising world in the form of a report on transparency. It found there wasn’t much.

LBMA Podcast: InfoBeamer, Baidu, RetailMeNot (Street Fight)
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: Neon AR, Toyota’s Safe & Sound, Chase #SapphireOn.

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