Street Fight Daily: Facebook Releases Slew of Local Features, Here Challenges Google Maps

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TODAY IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING

Facebook Announces Slew of Changes to Boost Local Businesses (Street Fight)
A couple of weeks after Google announced changes to local event discovery, Facebook is announcing a bevy of updates intended to make connecting with local businesses easier for its 2 billion users. Here’s everything you need to know. Local Onliner: Facebook approaches banks for new generation of ‘transaction marketing’

Here Attacks Google Maps with New Freemium Website Plan (Engadget)
Developers of local sites were recently thrown for a loop when Google announced new, more expensive pricing and demanded a credit card and Google Cloud account for all API access to Maps. To profit from this discord, Here has unveiled a new “freemium” plan.

Alexa Users Are Reportedly Not Buying Anything with Their Voice (Quartz)
A report Monday from The Information claims the company has sold about 50 million Alexa smart speakers, which first went on sale in 2014. However, only 2% of Alexa speakers have reportedly been used to make a purchase from Amazon in 2018.

Report: 34% of Ad Impressions Placed on Low-Quality Sites (Street Fight)
Reputable brands have pushed back hard against having their ads appear alongside content that goes against their values—for example, advertising running alongside articles or videos about how to complete the Tide PODS challenge—but Gartner L2’s research shows that the pushback hasn’t been effective enough, and the industry still has work to do.

DISRUPTION IN RETAIL

Johnson & Johnson Taps Interactive Mobile Ads to Drive Retail Conversions (AdExchanger)
One new tool in J&J’s shopper marketing and media arsenal is Dabbl, an app for iOS and Android that lets users earn gift cards for engaging with ads. Clients include Mondelez, Barilla, Hormel, Duncan Hines, and Poland Spring.

Online Retailers Are Using Empty Mall Spaces to Test Products (Digiday)
With big-box retailers closing stores, operators are exploring new uses for mall spaces to cope with a six-year high in mall vacancy rates in the U.S. — reportedly 8.6 percent in the second quarter of 2018.

POWER PUBLISHERS

Has Snapchat Already Stopped Growing? (Recode)
It was less than two years ago that Snap was out pitching itself as the next Facebook to bankers ahead of its highly anticipated initial public offering. Now it looks like Snapchat, the company’s flagship app, may already be done growing.

Apple, Facebook, and YouTube Remove Content from Alex Jones and Infowars (NYT)
Top technology companies erased most of the posts and videos on their services from Alex Jones, the internet’s notorious conspiracy theorist, thrusting themselves into a fraught debate over their role in regulating what can be said online.

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Joe Zappa is the Managing Editor of Street Fight. He has spearheaded the newsroom's editorial operations since 2018. Joe is an ad/martech veteran who has covered the space since 2015. You can contact him at [email protected]