News and Analysis

New Hires at Cooler Screens, Good-Loop, and BRIDGE

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 Cooler Screens, Good-Loop, and BRIDGE.

Instagram Becomes a Product Discovery Engine

Instagram has somehow conditioned its users to see it as a product discovery engine. Its feed is filled with fashion and food products … and users lap it up.

LiveRetail Aims to Build the Canva of Hyperlocal Advertising

LiveRetail is aiming to solve the problem of localized creative with what co-founder Wayne Reuvers calls the “Canva” of hyperlocal advertising.

Commentary

Location Weekly: Mobiquity Technologies Tracks Covid-19

In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers PopID and Wasserstrom releasing a facial recognition and temperature screening system, Locomizer launching its High Streets Recovery Tracker with Centre for Cities, Mobiquity Technologies releasing “hot spot” algorithms to measure Covid-19 traffic, and Moving Walls acquiring Ahoy.

States are Reopening. It’s Time to Start Thinking About OOH Again.

Ultimately, we know that people will go back outside. And they’ve already done so, with the average distance traveled amongst Americans up at least 28% since the first week of April, according to Geopath and Intermx. With more consumers back out on the roads, OOH will rebound to “become more valuable than ever.” Now is the time for agencies and brands to get ahead of competitors, revisit their OOH strategies, and smartly phase them back into plans.

Here are five things to consider.

Video Marketing: A Definitive Guide for Fitness Businesses

There’s a good chance that you’ve seen competitor brands using video marketing and that you’ve heard it’s the next big thing. You may, however, not be sure if it really is a viable option for your fitness business. If this sounds like you, keep reading. 

I’ll share all you need to know about using video marketing for your brand. I’ll cover how you can develop a video marketing strategy, types of videos you can create, and bonus tips to help you elevate your video content. But first, let’s look at why video really is the next big thing.

Latest Posts

Report: Websites and GMB Profiles Both Essential for Local Businesses

A whopping 64% of respondents indicated relying on Google My Business to find contact information for local business, suggesting it’s an indispensable platform. Yet consumers still trust local business websites most of all, and only 8% say they never consult a business’ website when making shopping decisions.

Brands Push Forward with Automation, But Privacy and Creepiness Concerns Remain

“Marketing automation is all the rage. Everyone feels like they need to ‘do it’ or they’ll be left behind. That rush to do the latest ‘new thing’ without thoughtful planning often leads to failure,” says Winston Lord, co-founder of Venga, a guest management platform that uses automation to enhance customer experiences. “It’s critical to build a 360 degree view of your client and your strategy before implementing marketing automation.”

Programmatic OOH Is Real. Why Isn’t Your Agency Using It More?

The ad tech industry’s state of flux and disarray spurs confusion and buyer skepticism of real innovation. This is particularly prevalent in rapidly evolving areas like programmatic that also contend with existing legacy trust issues. I come across this every day, as there seems to be a persistent rumor that programmatic Out of Home (OOH) is “fake,” and that, when looking under the hood, programmatic OOH is merely an automated process for reserving and purchasing inventory. This misconception results in missed opportunities for marketers.

Factual Partners with Airship and Braze to Power Location-Based Mobile Marketing

The partnership will enhance Airship and Braze’s efforts to furnish clients with precise mobile messaging based on the location of the customers they want to reach. Airship and Braze help brands engage their customers, retaining their business and ideally driving them back in-store. Airship rebranded, dropping the Urban from its name, last month.

Will Google Ask Businesses to Pay for Listings?

Google recently sent surveys to a number of Google My Business (GMB) users, asking a range of questions about their local marketing activities and their level of interest in certain paid features within GMB. The survey suggests that Google is at least thinking about a paid version of the GMB feature set. For the local search industry, a paid GMB product offered to businesses of all types could be quite disruptive, especially if it ended up gradually degrading the value of organic listings.

Letter From the Editor: Retail Transformation Rules

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. And that’s usually in proximity to one’s home (thus, local).

This makes retail transformation a key focal point for Street Fight. And there’s a lot happening.

May Focus: Visualizing Local

Street Fight is rolling into May with the theme, Visualizing Local: a look at how marketers are using visual content to boost visibility, presence, and conversions. This includes everything from images in search results and local listings to utilizing increasingly popular social media like Instagram Stories.

Foursquare’s Location-Based Loyalty Metrics Point to Best Practices for Casual Restaurants

Brushing aside customer surveys and other imprecise measures of customer loyalty, location intelligence firm Foursquare released a location-based report this morning that evaluates best practices and practitioners in loyalty among casual restaurant chains. 

Most importantly for future considerations, the report suggests that brands can improve loyalty in all four of the areas that contributed to its index.

Voice Marketing Starts with Smart SEO

How can enterprises better leverage voice search for brand marketing? To start, winning in voice search demands many of the same strategies as search engine optimization (SEO), as the goal in both cases is to get your content to rank position zero on search engine results pages (SERPs) by focusing on authority.

Report: Consumer Expectations for Brands Higher than Ever in Age of Convenience

With the omnichannel age upon us, the impact of bad customer experiences is unprecedented. The main fear for businesses should no longer be a standoff between the worker behind the customer service desk and the angry customer who failed to get his discount; it should be the rant that hits social and is shared or liked a slew of times, dragging digital reputations through the mud.