Will eBay Be the Next Giant in Local?
It’s not just about where users are spatially, or what device they’re on. It’s a function of where they are in the proverbial purchase funnel — the increasingly convoluted path between offline and offline worlds that leads from awareness to purchase. “The boundaries between the physical and digital world have disappeared, says WHERE’s Walt Doyle, “and the purchase funnel has become a purchase pretzel.”
Local Stores Become Showrooms for Online Buying
“Showrooming” refers to the act of using local stores as showrooms for more price-competitive online purchases. Retailers can get on the right side of this trend by beating Amazon at its own data-centric game. That means launching apps — or working with those that aggregate retail feeds, such as Milo — through which personal recommendations and incentives are offered to in-store buyers…
One Last Round of 2012 Predictions: Deals, Photo-Sharing, and Google Killers
In the coming year, the big names in mobile local usage (i.e. Yelp, Foursquare) will start to monetize their apps for the first time; U.S. mobile ad revenues will grow 50 percent over 2011, reaching $1.6 billion in 2012; and better targeting and personalization will replace deep discounts as the user “hook” for deals companies…
Delivering Local Deals: It’s All About the Data
It’s become clear that the two hottest areas of digital media — deals and mobile — are colliding. Mobile payments (i.e. Google Wallet) are meanwhile closing the loop on decades-old deal redemption and tracking challenges. This has led to another important variable: Data. More specifically, mobile payment technologies open the door for more comprehensive consumer purchase data, which can fold back into the equation for more targeted deal delivery…
Google Offers: Not a ‘Groupon Killer’ (But Still Pretty Killer)
It’s been widely reported over the past few weeks that Google has launched a deals platform known as Offers. But most of this coverage has missed the point — falling into the tired but pervasive trope of “[insertnamehere] Killer” claims (in this case, Groupon). Offers will be similar to Groupon in some ways, but its economics and mobile integration are quite different. Comparisons aside, the real story is how Offers plugs into Google’s massive distribution network of search, Gmail, mobile and about 26 other products.
Local Deals’ Second Act: Dynamic, Mobile
In the tech and media worlds, it’s no secret that local deals and mobile are exploding — both in terms of revenue growth as well as in the attention and investment being lavished upon them. Surprisingly, though, the two elements haven’t yet come together to the degree that they probably should…
2011: The Year the Check-in Reached Puberty
Michael Boland is a guest author. To submit a guest post, go here.
In the location wars of the past two years, one of the battle cries has been the need to continually innovate “beyond the check-in” — building things on top of the core check-in function, driven by evolving device capability and user demand (or boredom).
Companies have taken this in various directions — “checking in” to TV shows, for example. Sector leader Foursquare has dabbled in things like Superbowl check-ins.
At least week’s Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, California, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley talked about how the check-in grows up even as it stays focused on “the relationship between people and places.”..
Can Local Save Mobile Ads?
Oversupply of ad inventory on mobile could lead to the kind of runaway commoditization of display ads that developed on desktop over the past decade. The result: tanking CPMs. So how do we avoid that in mobile?