Street Fight Daily: Prime Day Undercuts Brick-and-Mortars, Google’s Local Staying Power Supersedes Social

BIG TECH & LOCAL: AMAZON, GOOGLE, FACEBOOK

Prime Day 2017 Marked Week of Lowest Foot Traffic for Retailers Last Summer (Street Fight)
Those are the latest numbers on foot traffic and e-commerce from location data experts at Foursquare, which posted the information on Medium. As we suggested over here at Street Fight last week, Prime Day, which arrives this Monday and continues on through Tuesday, is a testament to Amazon’s power to disrupt all of retail when it so chooses. Also see: Digiday on Prime Day and publishers, TechCrunch on Amazon’s own devices, Quartz on sales, and Fast Company on strikes in Europe.

Does Google Really Need a Social Network to Succeed at Local? (Street Fight)
“The driving vision of Google’s entire local arc is to be able to give a single eyes-free answer to any query with local intent. Social features like reviews, Guides, business owner data, and Q&A are just the means to that end,” writes David Mihm in his biweekly column with Mike Blumenthal.

Facebook Is Finding New Uses for Instagram (Bloomberg)
In late June, Spencer Chen got an unusual notification from Instagram. The app prompted him to check out a friend’s new photo—on Facebook. Mediapost: Clinch launches solution for personalized Instagram Stories ads. Wired: Inside Facebook’s early days

DRIVING REVENUE AND LOCKING DOWN DEALS IN LOCAL

How Business Reviews Contribute to Local SEO (Street Fight)
Harsha Annadurai: Local businesses need to pay attention to the reviews that they are getting to make sure that they have an optimized online presence. Reviews definitely play a part in a business’ local SEO, and they also help improve customer interaction and CTR.

As Ad Sector Focuses on Data, Lots of Deals Get Done (eMarketer)
After a few rough years where many of the biggest ad tech companies saw their valuations crater, a handful of recent deals among some of the industry’s largest players anecdotally indicate that investor confidence is rising.

Amobee Wins Bankruptcy Auction to Take Control of Videology Assets (The Drum)
Amobee has been named the winner of the auction to take control of the assets of Videology with a bid of $117.3m, which will likely fall to become just over $101.2m net purchase.

UPS AND DOWNS AT SNAPCHAT AND UBER

Snapchat’s Programmatic Turnaround Helps It Compete with Facebook (AdExchanger)
The low inventory prices and data and user-tracking features that have accompanied Snapchat’s programmatic transition are making the company more competitive with Facebook and Instagram. 

At Uber, New Questions Arise About Executive Behavior (NYT)
Barney Harford was hired late last year to help fix problems at Uber, the ride-hailing company. Instead, he has created new ones.