Street Fight Spotlight
June Focus: Pursuing Privacy
The privacy movement will have ripple effects throughout the media and advertising worlds that Street Fight covers. In fact, you could argue that privacy issues are most sensitive whenever we’re talking about content or ads that are targeted based on the user’s location. So how is the location-based media world dealing with these shifts? This is the question we’ll strive to answer throughout the month.
Foursquare Acquires Placed, Announces $150M in Funding
Foursquare and Placed are location tech’s new power couple.
The location intelligence firm is acquiring Placed, which had previously been bought by Snap for its top-rate online-to-offline attribution solution, and the two will offer one of the most powerful attribution solutions in the location industry, to be called Placed powered by Foursquare.
As ad tech faces tougher times and a privacy-driven crackdown on data collection and ad targeting practices, more mergers and acquisitions are likely to transform the industry’s terrain. Teaming up and stockpiling as much first-party data as possible, thereby eliminating the need for less compliant modes of data harvesting, will boost the longevity of some firms while others flounder.
Visual Search Moves Beyond Experimentation and Into Prime Time
After years of experimentation and broad discussions about how visual search would someday take hold, it’s clear that the future has arrived. Visual search has moved into the mainstream, and companies like Pinterest, Instagram, and even Google are paving the way for consumers to engage more deeply with the products they find online.
As visual search moves into the mainstream, questions are intensifying over what impact the medium will have on SEO and traditional search metrics.
Latest Posts
Marketers Prepare for Father’s Day Boom
With just two days to go before the big day, brand marketers would be smart to ramp up their campaigns now. Researchers at the digital advertising platform ZypMedia discovered that shoppers purchasing gifts for Father’s Day don’t plan nearly as far in advance as they do for Christmas and other major holidays. As a result, last-minute campaigns targeting shoppers are much more likely to have a major impact.
Fostering Brand-Customer Relationships in the Age of Social Checkout and Chatbots
Currently, 74% of consumers visit the social media pages of brands to inspire future purchases. And as evidenced by the popularity of Instagram Checkout, sales tools like Apple Business Chat, and new ad products like Google‘s Shoppable Ads, the industry is rapidly moving towards commerce that removes the friction between inspiration and an actual purchase.
But when the path to purchase is shortened, so is the opportunity for brand and customer to interact, which is probably what attracted your customers in the first place. Especially in the world of social media, brand persona is an enduring element that differentiates your brand and creates fans out of customers.
The good news is, you don’t have to sacrifice brand voice for a social commerce strategy. In fact, with the right tools, you can enhance it.
After Foursquare Acquisition, Placed Founder David Shim Talks Teaming Up With a Major Competitor
How did a Seattle-based ad tech company move up the ranks to become an industry darling, less than eight years after its launch? And how does the new relationship between Foursquare and Placed, which was previously the biggest competitor to the company’s Foursquare Attribution product, impact the location industry at large?
To find out, we caught up with Placed founder and CEO—and now president of Foursquare—David Shim. Here are his thoughts on what it’s like to go through an acquisition, and how two industry heavyweights who’ve competed for years are finding new ways to work together.
Report: Huge Hole in Location Data Market for O2O Attribution
Good news for the whole location-based marketing industry—a new report from location data firm Factual based on a survey of location data buyers finds the field is getting more effective and better at measuring its results. Nearly 9 in 10 marketers said location data is driving more effective campaigns. Eighty-six percent said it’s growing their customer base, and 84% reported higher customer engagement.
However, while use of location-based marketing is set to grow to 94%, only 24% use it or are planning to use it to establish offline attribution.
AR Impacts Local Commerce, Disrupting Home Services and Retail
AR is emerging at a time when the physical retail world is undergoing significant transformation. Things like Amazon Go stores and the counteractive “retail as a service” movement have raised awareness and hunger for retail evolution. So AR’s retail shopping use cases fall on fertile soil.
But retail is just one way that AR intersects with local commerce. AR comes into play in another key local commerce category: home services. Innovators like Streem are bringing remote assistance to traditional service calls (think: busted pipe).
5 Privacy-Focused Data Marketplaces
Just 27% of adults feel like they have “some control” over how their personal data is used by mobile apps and services, according to a recent survey by Mobile Ecosystem Forum. The desire to have more say over how personal data is used is leading to a new technology vertical, as next-generation data brokers put together marketplaces where consumers can offer up their own data to brands in exchange for cash and other lucrative incentives.
Here are five examples of services that consumers are using to take control of the data they share with advertisers and keep their private information private.
4 Marketing Use Cases for AR Today
Augmented reality is making the leap from hyped technology of the future to driver of cutting-edge marketing techniques today. To document the state of the field and shine a light on those use cases, the IAB released its AR marketing playbook earlier this month.
In case you’re too busy to peruse the pdf, I’ll detail the major use cases outlined in the report.
Google Antitrust: Is It Enough for Yelp?
Mihm to Blumenthal: I’m not averse to the idea of the government regulating Google’s practices in Maps or local search, but it feels like rewarding Yelp in particular is not going to bring consumers any particular benefit, nor will it meaningfully benefit small businesses, as Elizabeth Warren seems to indicate is a primary goal of her plan.
If anything, Google has gone out of its way to help small businesses compete in its search results with the introduction of the local pack and the Venice update, whereas small businesses continue to rate Yelp as poorly as any company in tech.
Awarding Innovation: Presenting the Street Fight Innovator Awards
Street Fight’s charter is to bring you news and insights on local media, marketing and commerce. And a key corollary to that mission is to recognize and award the innovators driving these sectors. So, we’re bringing back an old Street Fight staple with a new twist: The Street Fight Innovator Awards.
We’ll present awards at a future event to be announced soon. They’ll include several categories of media and advertising (listed below) and allow you the opportunity to apply for consideration. Enrollment starts today and runs through July 12. You can apply here.
LBMA Vidcast: Foursquare’s Big Acquisition, Wendy’s Teams with GasBuddy
On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Eleven-X + Skyhook, NCR Digital + SAFE Credit Union, Albert Heijn tries dynamic pricing, Foursquare buys Placed from Snap, GrandVisual + NCMEC finding missing persons, Wendy’s partners with GasBuddy for Memorial Day campaign.
Street Fight Columns
To Share or Not to Share: How Gamification is Swaying the Modern Consumer’s Loyalty
Although 94% of C-suite leaders consider customers’ data to be of paramount importance, privacy continues to be a hot-button issue. Data privacy practices have come under increased scrutiny with the passing of regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation, aimed at protecting individuals from the misuse and exploitation of personal information. Even as consumers continue to debate the tradeoff between convenience and control, one thing is clear—they are craving a more intuitive and personalized experience. How, then, can companies reconcile the differences and walk the tightrope as they acquire a 360-degree view of their audience?
Gamification is one path forward.