News and Analysis
Long Pandemic and Local Commerce: Expert Roundup
Street Fight’s core focus is localized commerce and marketing: how brick-and-mortar businesses use technology to connect with customers. This month, we’re covering the continued impact of the pandemic on that space. To that end, three martech and retail tech leaders from VDX.tv, CatapultX, and VAI expound on the pandemic and local commerce in this expert roundup.
Simpli.fi’s Political Ad Tool Mixes Data Sets for Improved Match Rates
While politicians and PACs compete for contributions, agencies are working behind the scenes to help their clients’ ad dollars go further. A political advertising tool recently unveiled by Simpli.fi claims to do just that, mixing address lists from data providers and first-party databases to increase match rates.
Commentary
Impending Brand Safety Woes: Nasty and Misleading Political Ads Hit Facebook
If brand safety in the 2020 election season does not immediately seem concerning, consider the following: You’re an advertiser hoping to run digital ads for your advertising tech solution. You pay a publisher with huge traffic big money to score impressions on its platform. But as soon as a Democratic voter navigates to the site and sees your ad, along with it pops up a big Trump ad making inflammatory claims about Biden. The web surfer navigates away from the site. Who wins?
Last-Minute Shoppers Help Small Retailers Compete with Amazon for Holiday Sales
During the holiday shopping season, it’s Amazon’s world — or is it?
Outside the digital sphere, brick-and-mortar holiday sales at big-box shops like Walmart and Best Buy continue to be buoyed by bullish shoppers willing to hit the streets in search of timely deals during consumer-focused quasi-holidays like Black Friday. As a result, shoppers are spending more during the holidays than ever before.
And then there’s the independent, local retailer. How is a small shop supposed to compete with the ease of mobile e-commerce or the allure of big-box doorbuster deals? Turns out, they have an ace in the hole: last-minute shoppers.
Technology Planning: What Retailers Should Do Now to Prep for the Holiday Rush
Retailers will need to think differently when it comes to technology planning. With the holiday season looming, now is the best moment to develop a long-term technology strategy geared toward capturing more holiday sales in addition to driving revenue growth all year long.
Understanding a few key areas can help get the planning process started. This includes: exceeding consumers’ holiday shopping expectations, making holiday shopping more convenient, and enabling a holistic holiday shopping journey.
Latest Posts
#SFSNYC: Broadly CEO: Brick-and-Mortars Need to Become Messaging Centers
Phone calls and contact forms are dead, but what about websites? Not so much, said Josh Melick, CEO of Broadly, at Street Fight’s annual summit in New York Wednesday. With this trend showing no signs of stopping, websites—especially those of local businesses—need to become messaging centers.
#SFSNYC: The Growing Power of SMB OS
Until recently, brick-and-mortar shopping relied on the digital world for advertising functions and not much else. But now, local retail has a new digital arena—the full-service operating system. Three leaders in this expanding set of technological solutions for SMBs laid out the state of the field, known as SMB OS, at Street Fight Summit in New York Wednesday.
#SFSNYC: Making Conversational Interfaces the Frontline for Customer Interaction
The development of conversational language to interact with chatbots, digital assistants, smart devices, and other machines is changing the ways consumers make use of such platforms to find the information and services they want—and this change is only going to get more important for brands and local businesses to address.
How Peoria Journal Star Did a Lot More With Less After Deep Cuts Shrank the Newsroom
“We made it our mission, working with our publisher at the time, Ken Mauser, that we would reach out to the people of the South Side and make sure they had a place where they could tell us about the good things happening where they live,” Peoria Journal Star Executive Editor Dennis Anderon says of reaching out to neglected community members.
Most Local Merchants Unfazed by Facebook Controversies, Though Some Signs of Trouble
By now, consequences of the negative aura surrounding Facebook’s role in customer info abuse, fake news, and Russian political meddling should have started to take hold. Yet over half of local merchants we polled said they would continue to use Facebook as they had previously, and only one in five said they may use it less.
Street Fight Daily: Local Merchants Unfazed by Facebook Controversy, Consumers Apprehensive on Voice
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Most Local Merchants Unfazed by Facebook Controversies, Though Some Signs of Trouble… Report: Brands Abandoning Social Media Measurement… Microsoft’s GitHub Deal Marks Latest Shift from Windows…
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AI Is Breaking Down Data Silos — Without Breaking Privacy