Street Fight Daily: Google Assistant Fuels Hyperlocal Biz, Inside the Digital Content Bubble

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

Time Out Plans to Use Google Assistant to Grow to Connect Users with Local Businesses (Digiday)
City guide Time Out has developed an app for Google Assistant through which people can ask up to 100 questions about what to do in their city. Time Out will incorporate e-commerce deals into the assistant. For instance, people could hear three different theater show options, one of which could have a discount available as part of a partnership with the publisher.

With Tapad Partnership, Freckle IoT Extends Scale of Audience Data (Street Fight)
Until now, Tapad’s Device Graph has primarily been used by media companies looking to understand and measure their audiences. With this new partnership in place, however, Freckle’s large retail clients will have the ability to monitor consumer behaviors and determine which channels are most successful in driving sales.

Is The Digital Content Bubble About to Burst? (Nieman Lab)
Recent bad news for a number of digital-born news outlets is a symptom not only of the intense competition for attention and advertising online, but also of a digital content bubble where most news providers continue to operate at a loss — losses that cannot be sustained indefinitely.

Google My Business Looks to the Future (Street Fight)
Damian Rollison: Aditya Tendulkar is about as close to the source as you can get when it comes to the strategic direction of Maps and Google My Business. We asked him a few questions about the quick pace of feature releases in recent months and the new openness Google seems to be showing toward listing management companies and crowdsourcing. 

Free Research Report When You Take Street Fight’s “State of Hyperlocal” Survey  (Street Fight)
David Card: We’re kicking off our third annual executive survey about the state of the local marketing ecosystem. We welcome readers to share their thoughts on the state of the industry by filling out a short survey on what their companies are prioritizing and what challenges they’re facing. As a thank-you, for a limited time we’re offering a free report or a discount on Summit tickets. 

This Agency Brings Brands into the Digital Age (AdWeek)
Once primarily known for equipping retailers’ websites with ecommerce, Fluid has since evolved into a customer experience agency that works with brands to develop and design web, mobile and social platforms that engage consumers while also driving sales.

Tales From the Ads.txt Trenches (AdExchanger)
Ian Hewetson: Forget this summer’s solar eclipse. We’re witnessing something far more unusual right now: the universal endorsement of a single system in the ad tech world, the adoption of Ads.txt.

In 2018, Marketers Will Discover More AI Apps in Programmatic Advertising (eMarketer)
Using artificial intelligence to further optimize digital ad spending is the next step marketers are taking to make ads a more welcome part of consumers’ digital lives.

75% of Shopping Carts Abandoned on Thanksgiving Weekend (MediaPost)
Only one out of four online transactions resulted in a purchase Thanksgiving weekend according to a Barilliance study, but triggered email campaigns may have saved some of those lost sessions.

Lyft Gets an Investment from an Uber Investor (Recode)
Shareholders typically try to avoid conflicts of interest in their investments, but when it comes to Uber and Lyft it seems like all’s fair. Alphabet, for example, is also invested in both Uber and Lyft.

Pinterest Launches Facebook Messenger Bot (VentureBeat)
Pinterest on Tuesday launched its first Facebook Messenger bot to power Pin searches, as well as a chat extension to power collaborative visual search inside one of the most popular chat apps on the planet.

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