News and Analysis

Retailers Navigate Post-Holidays Spending Slump

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As retailers head further into the month of January—typically an overlooked month—they’re seeing shoppers returning and exchanging items at a rapid pace. They’re also struggling to clear out excess inventory before closing out the fiscal year and bracing for a tough few months ahead.

Let’s Replace TV Panels with Real Data About People to Reflect Changing Demographics

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Because the industry has yet to create a new replacement standard, media companies are continuing to use Nielsen panel data. But the solution might be simpler than we think: more accurate, ethically-sourced data that reflects changing demographics.

New Hires at SafeGuard Privacy, RFPIO, Claravine, and tvScientific

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The Street Fight new hires roundup features movers and shakers in adtech, martech, e-commerce, localized marketing, location intelligence, and more. This week’s roundup features new hires at SafeGuard, RFPIO, Claravine, and tvScientific.

Commentary

Ad Tech and Privacy

Why You Need to Build a Data Governance Team Right Now

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In today’s climate in which consumer and regulatory expectations change so quickly, data governance is increasingly becoming a necessary function for all businesses leveraging consumer data.

GDPR, CCPA, and future state and federal privacy laws force brands, agencies, tech vendors, and data providers to either comply or face fines and other legal action. Without a data governance team to operationalize and manage their consumer data assets, they put themselves at extreme risk of losing competitive advantage or of being put out of business altogether.

The All But Inevitable Outcome of the Facebook Advertiser Boycott

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The boycott may yet exert some meaningful pressure on Facebook to change its ways, but that outcome is unlikely. This is partly due to the dynamics of the advertising market itself but also to the global scale of Facebook’s business and the essential role end consumers must play in any boycott. It’s worth examining each of these factors in turn.

Changing Behaviors Are Influencing Targeting Tactics

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Online actions such as a person’s search history or the brands they like on social media platforms fall short in telling the full story of genuine consumer behavior. Offline behaviors, however, prove to be more indicative of a consumer’s likes, dislikes, and hobbies. During a time when people go fewer places, where they go tells us even more about who they are.

Latest Posts

How Americans Shop Today

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All industries—apparel, grocery, electronics—are affected differently by the move to e-commerce, and consumers are turning to new options, including social marketplaces, disrupting what we typically think of as digital shopping. Here are some insights on major market changes, including the key to Amazon’s dominance, the industries flouting the turn to e-commerce, and a curious preference among millennials, from a recent survey of 1,000 consumers by Signs.com.

4 Ways Multi-Location Businesses Improve Marketing Return with Call Analytics

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By implementing call tracking and analytics systems, marketers at multi-location businesses can obtain valuable first-party data on the calls and conversations they generate for each location. This first-party data helps inform marketing campaigns that open doors for new customers, reinforce relationships with current customers, and increase return on marketing spend. 

Not sure how to maximize the business impact of consumer calls on your multi-location brand? Discover four things you can do now. 

LBMA Vidcast: Kroger Launches Stratum Data Platform, SoundHound Integrates HERE

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On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Sweden’s “The Fitting Room,” Mabata Honesty Shop, Nutella goes voice commerce, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield brings the VOID to malls, SoundHound integrates HERE, Kroger launches Stratum data platform.

Meet the SF Awards Judges: True Value, Vitamin Shoppe, Denny’s, Chamberlain Group & WPP | The Store

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The circle is complete. We’ve rounded out the full panel of judges for Street Fight’s Innovator awards (Pro tip: today is the last day to apply).

Collectively, they represent:

15,350 business locations
150,986 employees
$25+ billion in annual revenues

But who are they? Here’s the rundown.

Letter From the Editor: Local is Everything

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Last month, for example, we zeroed in on the theme of retail transformation.

This month, we extend that discussion with a focus on the connected car. As companies like Tesla continue to innovate the digital experiences in our cars, they’re becoming the ultimate “mobile device.” This will have implications for local media companies and brands that have a local presence.

Meanwhile, last week we closed the application period for the Innovator Awards. The next step is to work with our panel of judges to choose the winners. The awards will be a central part of Street Fight’s plan to continue being an authority on innovation and transformation in the location-based media and advertising worlds.

Listen to Podcast: Heard on the Street

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August Focus: Local’s Next Battleground is Your Car

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Why are connected cars important to Street Fight (and to you)? As we continue to evolve the definition of “local,” one key component of its market opportunity is offline brick-and-mortar shopping. After all, about 90% of all U.S. retail spending, to the tune of about $3.7 trillion, is completed offline in physical stores. That is usually in proximity to one’s home (thus, local).

Could an increasingly digital and connected car influence those purchases when consumers are out and about? This is one extension of the local search that consumers used to do at home but now do on their mobile devices while on the move. The car could become a third point of connection and influence.

Low-Hanging Technical SEO Fruit for Local Ranking

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Local SEO is powerful. If you run an ice cream shop out of Wichita, Kansas, then you’d probably want to show up on Google when a person there searches for ice cream. Search engines have become crucial for existing and potential customers to connect with businesses. 

Some business owners unintentionally set up obstacles to appearing on local search by improper site structure. Here are some low-hanging fruits to help your business appear for local searches.

Heard on the Street, Episode 31: CDPs and Israeli Innovation

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As data science continues to collide with digital marketing, customer behavior metrics are reaching new levels of actionable insight. But counteracting that advantage is the growing fragmentation of devices and platforms used in the path to purchase, making it harder to get a single view of the customer.

This is the world of customer data platforms (CDPs), and it is where Optimove hangs its hat. Founder & CEO Pini Yakuel explains to us on the latest episode of Heard on the Street how the company helps brands and multi-location retailers get the insights they need to better serve their customers.

Phone-as-a-Service?

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It’s becoming clear that we’re headed toward a new vision for our devices: the Phone as a Service (PaaS). Yes, sounds crazy, but look at the parallels between your phone and how/why other “X”s have become services:

X-as-a-service (XaaS) is delivery of X directly via the internet, eliminating the need to use and manage multiple and independent solutions on locally hosted devices, right? So, PaaS is the delivery of personalized media via the phone, eliminating the need to use and manage multiple and independent, locally hosted apps. We’re already seeing that happen.