News and Analysis

Retailers Prepare for Increased Cyber Attacks During Prime Day

Cyber security experts are warning of increased phishing, ransomware, and social engineering attacks during Amazon’s Prime Day event this week, as more hackers take advantage of the event’s popularity to send credential harvesting emails to unsuspecting consumers. With the frequency of these attacks on the rise, multi-location retailers are beefing up their own digital security protocols and using external marketing channels to distribute warnings to their customers.

New Hires at Habu, Razorfish, and Channel Factory

The Street Fight new hires roundup features movers and shakers in adtech, martech, e-commerce, localized marketing, location intelligence, and more. This month’s roundup features new hires at Habu, Razorfish, and Channel Factory.

How Brands Can Prepare for a Federal Privacy Law

The American Data Privacy and Protection Act inched its way closer to reality earlier this month, advancing in the House and moving to the full Energy and Commerce Committee for approval. With support from both House and Senate committee leaders, it’s beginning to look like advertisers and marketers might finally be getting uniformity in privacy and data regulations across all 50 states.

Commentary

Where to Go from Here: The Outlook for Programmatic Advertising in 2020

eMarketer recently estimated that U.S. advertisers spent nearly $60 billion on programmatic display in 2019, and over the next two years, continued investment in areas like connected TV and OTT will drive programmatic ad spending to $80 billion.

As the ad industry launches into 2020, the ever-evolving programmatic landscape will introduce a fresh set of opportunities and challenges that will shape strategy in the new year. Here’s what to expect. 

The Core 4 Digital Marketing Challenges Multi-Location Brands Experience — And The Tech Solution

One particular area that’s difficult to navigate for multi-location companies is how to best serve highly targeted marketing campaigns to local customers across hundreds or thousands of very unique communities where your retail locations exist. Across the many multi-location brands at which I’ve worked, including national retailer Batteries Plus Bulbs, it’s an issue with which our internal marketing teams and outside ad agencies struggled. 

In this article, I’ll identify four main marketing challenges I believe all multi-location retail marketers can relate to and how to use technology to solve them.

SEO Trends for 2020 That You Need to Know

In 2020, we can only expect the competition for the attention of Internet audiences to become even more intense. More and more businesses appear each day, all raring to get to the top of the search results.

Add to that the fact that search engines, Google in particular, will continue to make changes to their algorithms in the coming year. SEOs must be on their toes to stay on top of the latest SEO trends. Here are some of the changes, which include the further ascendance of video, voice, and mobile as well as premiums on longer content and possible openings for non-Google search engines.

Latest Posts

At CallRail, Community Forums Prove Valuable for Product Development

Community forums—online spaces where consumers and developers can interact and collaborate— are increasingly popular tools for companies hoping to improve their product development and ideation. The strategy is working effectively for marketing tech vendor CallRail.

Street Fight Daily: Uber Cash Burn Narrowing En Route to IPO, CallRail Engages User Base to Drive Product Dev

TODAY IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING… Uber’s Losses Continue, But Narrow, In Its March Toward an IPO… At CallRail, Community Forums Prove Valuable for Product Development… How Yelp’s Revamped Ad Biz Powered a Great Quarter…

Uberall Partners With TripAdvisor for Multilocation Reputation Management

While it has become commonplace for hotels and restaurants to check their TripAdvisor ratings on a regular basis, the process breaks down as the size of the business grows, causing brands with hundreds of locations to struggle. The digital location marketing platform Uberall is trying to change that.

Bridg Positions Itself as Marketing Arm for Offline Businesses

Many brick-and-mortar businesses struggle to track and market to their customers in a way that generates additional sales. A startup called Bridg is looking to change that by launching a platform designed to help restaurants and retailers connect with “previously invisible” customers.

Street Fight Daily: The American Version of GDPR Is Coming, Supersized Funding Rounds Becoming Common

TODAY IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING… Should Ad Tech Panic Over the California Privacy Protection Act Now or Later?… $100 Million Was Once Big Money for a Startup. Now, It’s Common… Bridg Positions Itself as Marketing Arm for Offline Businesses…

Happy Returns Expands Into College Market

Startup Happy Returns, based in Santa Monica and founded by alums from HauteLook and NordstromRack.com, offers a way for shoppers to return e-commerce purchases at real-world kiosks. Beginning this fall, Happy Returns will be setting up kiosks—which it calls “Return Bars”—at five campuses around the country to capitalize on the returns generated by back-to-college online shopping.

Survey: Identifying Best Practices in Reputation and Review Management

Multi-location brands that use reputation and review management to manage local marketing and advertising are more likely to say that their marketing efforts are effective, according to Street Fight’s latest survey. Analysis of the survey identified several related strategies that correlated strongly with marketing effectiveness, including trying to respond to every review and working with a reputation specialist with its own technology.

Street Fight Daily: Best Practices in Reputation and Review Management, Ad Tech Consolidation

TODAY IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING… Survey: Identifying Best Practices in Reputation and Review Management… As Duopoly Reigns, Ad Tech Industry Consolidates… Happy Returns Expands Into College Market…

As Local Search Enters the Voice Era, Three Content Channels Dominate

You’re well covered today on the three top voice platforms if you have strong listings on Google, Apple, and Yelp. If you want to do even more, make sure your Bing listings are up to date for Cortana (note that Yelp reviews show up here as well), and submit your listing info to Here and Foursquare in order to be found in Samsung’s Bixby interface.  

DexYP (and Other Publishers) Transition to Digital, But Limited Revenue Suggests Bleak Long-Term Prospects

“DexYP seems to be doing as many things right as one can expect from a huge Yellow Pages entity. But somehow they, and other publishers, need to transition to a more consultative higher-price point position,” David Mihm tells Mike Blumenthal in this edition of their biweekly column.