Street Fight Daily: Walmart Continues to Innovate, Mobile Video Ad Spend Overtakes Display
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Walmart Develops a Personal Shopper Service and Store Without Cashiers (Recode)
When Walmart paid $3 billion for Jet.com and its founder Marc Lore, the promise was that the entrepreneur would help the retailer appeal to new types of customers. Here’s the next step in that evolution.
LMA Goes Small to Spread Disruptive Ideas Among Local Publishers (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: A recent Innovation Mission to San Francisco/Silicon Valley drew 13 senior executives in the news business (newspapers, TV, radio and research and development). It was built around three themes: audience engagement, platform strategies and using human-centered “design thinking” to solve thorny problems that bedevil most news providers.
Mobile Video Ad Spend Overtakes Display (MediaPost)
For the first time ever, we know now that video on mobile overtook video on display. That’s according to fresh findings from IAB and PwC, which report that mobile video ad spend reached $2.6 billion in the first half of the year.
Brands Can Now Sponsor Snapchat Filters with Animated Messages (AdWeek)
Dunkin’ Donuts is the first advertiser to buy a so-called sponsored animated filter to celebrate the winter solstice tomorrow—the darkest day of the year. The campaign promotes the brand’s dark roast coffee and the creative changes over the course of the day to increasingly get darker.
Former Orbitz CEO Joins Uber as the Company’s First COO (CNBC)
Barney Harford, former CEO of Orbitz, will join the company Jan. 2. Harford has deep ties with Uber’s new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, who was previously the chief executive of Expedia. Harford has been an advisor to Uber since October and is on the board of United Airlines and RealSelf.
Twitter Turns a Page in Live Video (AdExchanger)
Twitter is gunning to become publishers’ platform partner of choice, and it’s leveraging live video as a way to capture content – and dollars – currently flowing to the duopoly.
How the New York Times Gets People to Spend 5 Minutes Per Visit on the Site (Digiday)
In 2017, people spent about five minutes per visit on the Times’ site, which is up 35 percent from 2016, according to comScore reports pulled by an ad buyer. For the Times, getting users to spend more time on the site is part of a broader effort to drive subscriptions, which have become central to its business model.
Didi Chuxing, Chinese Rival to Uber, Raises $4 Billion (NYT)
China’s answer to Uber is catching up with its American rival in a key metric: money. With the latest investment, Didi Chuxing’s valuation has been increased to $56 billion. That is up significantly from April, when it was valued at about $50 billion after a $5.5 billion fund-raising round that also included SoftBank.
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