Street Fight Daily: How to Manage Google’s Local Services Ads, Instagram Building Standalone Commerce App
TODAY IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING AND MEDIA
3 Tips for Managing Local Services Ads (Street Fight)
Joy Hawkins: Google expanded Local Services ads to the San Diego area in November 2016 and has been rapidly expanding this platform across different verticals and markets in the USA over the last two years. If you’re considering running Local Services ads, here are three things to know before getting started.
Social’s Hottest Platform Is Building a Standalone App for Commerce (Verge)
The app—which may be called IG Shopping—will let users browse collections of goods from merchants that they follow and purchase them directly within the app, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Ad Tech Needs a Shared ID Solution ASAP (AdExchanger)
Martin Kihn: Only 15% of marketers say they can consistently recognize audiences across channels, even as they spend almost $900 million this year on services and solutions to the problem, according to a recent Association of National Advertisers report. Yes, identity is a problem that is much easier to admire than to solve. But the time to solve it is now.
With Product Launches, Drift Moves Conversational Marketing Into Prime Time (Street Fight)
By launching a Conversational Advertising product, Drift is looking to create a new category of online advertising—one that leads potential customers directly from digital ads to real conversations, without relying on the types of static landing pages and lead forms that tend to slow sales processes down.
Heard on the Street, Episode 11: Pivot Dynamics with Gravy Analytics’ Jeff White (Street Fight)
“As an entrepreneur, they always say you have to be gritty and tough, and the world’s going to kick you in the teeth, and you have to keep going and persevere,” said Gravy Analytics founder and CEO Jeff White, our latest guest on Heard on the Street. “But sometimes that comes at the expense of having a vision that’s blinding. So you can’t not take your head up and realize, we may be off course.”
HOT TAKES AND HEADY DAYS FOR AMAZON
Amazon Is Now Worth $1 Trillion. What Comes Next is More Scrutiny of Its Power (Recode)
The only certainty on the path to the next trillion is a bigger spotlight on Amazon’s growing power, both internally as it pertains to its treatment of its warehouse workers and externally related to how its dominance impacts the rest of the retail industry, its partners like the United States Postal Service, as well as the cities that it calls home.
Amazon Sets Its Sights on the $88 Billion Online Ad Market (NYT)
The push by the giant online retailer means consumers — even Prime customers, who pay $119 a year for access to free shipping as well as streaming music, video and discounts — are likely to be confronted by ads in places where they didn’t exist before.
Amazon Opens Its Largest High-Tech Convenience Store Yet (TechCrunch)
Amazon is picking up the pace when it comes to unveiling its line of “stores of the future,” today opening its second cashier-less Amazon Go convenience store in the last week. More Amazon Go locations are expected to land in other cities soon, though the company has yet to confirm any plans.
CUTTING-EDGE CONTENT
Facebook Thinks It Can Make Social Video Happen Where Netflix Couldn’t (Quartz)
“We are fundamentally different,” Fidji Simo, Facebook’s head of video, told CNBC. “We are really not focused on passive consumption of video. We are focused on building communities and connections around videos.”
How The Guardian Overhauled Its Content Studio (Digiday)
Although the Guardian doesn’t break out what slice Labs revenue contributes to the overall £108.6 million ($140 million) digital ad revenue pie, content studio revenue has risen 66 percent in the first half of this year, compared to the first half of last year, according to the publisher.
