Street Fight Happenings
July Focus: Retail Transformation in the Amazon Age
Street Fight is rolling into July with the monthly theme Disrupting Retail: a look at how retail continues to transform, driven by competition from Amazon and key trends like “retail-as-a-service.”
But why is this 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. And that’s usually in proximity to one’s home (thus, local).
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.
Letter From the Editor: How Will 2019 Be Remembered?
Perhaps the topic we’ll remember most from this year is the rising attention to and hand wringing over privacy. In the media and advertising worlds, especially subsectors that pertain to location data, executives and consumers are feeling the broader privacy discussion acutely. We just passed the one-year mark for GDPR.
Theme of the Month: The Connected Car
How Long Will Google’s “Calculative PR” Playbook Work in Local Search?
Mihm: The engineering mindset that millions of spammy listings in a corpus of hundreds of millions of legitimate listings worldwide, or a (hundred million?) spam reviews in a corpus of billions of legitimate reviews worldwide, are simply “edge cases” that are beneath Google to prioritize reflects a profound lack of empathy for how their technology impacts fellow human beings — both consumers and especially small business owners and their employees.
Blumenthal: Absolutely agree. And a related problem is that they see customer service in the same context: as an engineering/cost-benefit problem to solve, not as a way to improve their product. As such they see the last 5, 10 or 15% errors in their big data solutions as just a cost of doing business that they have no responsibility to solve.
July Focus: Retail Transformation in the Amazon Age
Street Fight is rolling into July with the monthly theme Disrupting Retail: a look at how retail continues to transform, driven by competition from Amazon and key trends like “retail-as-a-service.”
But why is this 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. And that’s usually in proximity to one’s home (thus, local).
Startups Adapt to Shifting Privacy Standards
Two steps forward, one step back. That’s what it can feel like to be a technology provider in the location marketing space right now, struggling to strike a balance between the demands of brand marketers and growing concerns over consumer privacy and data regulation.
That push and pull is challenging vendors in the location marketing space. At the same time their firms should be seeing exponential growth, data regulations—including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s forthcoming Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)—are establishing new rules for innovation.
But some companies are embracing the regulation as a challenge to innovate in its own right.
Latest Posts
How to Identify and Connect with Your Ideal Podcast Ad Audience
While just over half of Americans have listened to them, podcasts are finding new audiences every day. U.S. advertisers spent $479 million on podcast ads in 2018, up 53% year-over-year; that figure is expected to hit $1 billion in 2021. And those people who do listen to podcasts listen to them a LOT. Podcasts are the number one audio source by time of consumption among podcast listeners, and weekly listeners consume an average seven podcasts per week, according to Edison Research.
Podcast advertising is rapidly evolving, as are podcasts themselves. It’s no wonder, then, that advertisers could use help identifying the right podcasts for their products and connecting with podcast audiences. Here’s what you need to know about podcasts and their audiences to find the right home for your podcast advertisements.
How Americans Shop Today
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
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
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
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
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.
August Focus: Local’s Next Battleground is Your Car
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
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
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.
Street Fight Columns
Fake Reviews Are Silicon Valley’s Next Fake News Problem