News and Analysis

New Hires at Publica, January Digital, Vibrant Media

The monthly 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 CTV ad platform Publica, digital analytics company January Digital, and contextual marketing firm Vibrant Media.

5 Ad Tech Platforms for Supermarket Chains

In a move that’s been a long time coming, supermarkets are finally switching from print to digital advertising en masse. Printing circulars and paper coupons are being replaced by sponsored search and display ads as supermarkets both boost their own advertising spend and set up retail media networks to allow brands to better reach their shoppers. Amazon paved the way for grocers to advertise online with its acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, but continued growth in 2022 is due primarily to surging demand for last-mile grocery delivery via mobile apps like Instacart and DoorDash.

Ad Tech and Privacy

How Do Marketers Maximize the Value of Customer Data?

Street Fight connected with Arun Kumar, EVP, data and insights at Hero Digital, to learn more about how marketers can maximize the value of data at a time when third-party data is disappearing from the market.

Commentary

Using Location Intelligence as Marketing Pixels for the Real World

Without pixels, marketing in the digital world would be a guessing game. However, with 90% of all commerce still taking place in the physical world, oftentimes marketers find themselves in the dark, not knowing how their customers are interacting with their brands offline. Enter location intelligence, or as we like to call it, pixels for the real world. 

Take a moment to reflect on the past few weeks. Did you stop at a coffee shop on the way to work? Did you work out on specific days of the week at a nearby gym? Are there restaurants you frequent when you are too lazy to cook at home? In a study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers found that people frequent up to 25 places at any given time period. Similar to marketing pixels placed on websites, the ability to understand physical, real-world behavior such as path-to-purchase, visitation patterns, day-of-week preferences, and daily activities fuels more strategic decision making. 

LBMA Vidcast: Amazon to Roll Out Hand Recognition Payment at Whole Foods

On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Skoda announces in-car voice assistant Laura, Philadelphia bans stores that don’t accept cash, Kochava teams with CubeIQ, GOAT let’s you try on exclusive sneakers in AR, Olo powering restaurant orders from Google search and maps, Amazon to roll-out hand recognition payment at Whole Foods.

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?

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Programmatic Comes to Audio, Publishers See Increase in Direct Traffic

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… DoubleClick Bid Manager Opens Up Digital Audio Ad Buying Globally… In the Post-Facebook Era, Publishers See Rise in Direct Traffic… Mobile App Header Bidding Expands Monetization Opportunities for Publishers…

SMB OS Operators, Part IV: Peter Krasilovsky

“We like to cite $500 billion as the broad SMB OS opportunity—roughly 3.5 times the size of local advertising,” veteran industry commentator Peter Krasilovsky says. “But I think the end number has got to be many times larger.”

Research Highlights Shifting Social Media Dynamics for Brands

Rachael Samuels, social media manager at Sprout Social, hopes that brand marketers who look at the research come away with a greater understanding that social cannot be approached with a one-size-fits-all mentality, and what works for one industry, or even one brand, may not work for another.

Street Fight Daily: Programmatic Plummets in Europe, The SMB OS Opportunity

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… GDPR Mayhem: Programmatic Ad Buying Plummets in Europe… How Do Consumers Choose in a World of Automated Ordering?… Google Bests Amazon in Smart Speaker Shipments…

How Not to Respond to Reviews: 10 Common Pitfalls

Contrary to the popular saying, all publicity isn’t good publicity. It’s quite possible to go about review response in a way that does more harm than good. Listed below are 10 common practices that won’t do your business any favors and are arguably worse than no response at all.

Street Culture: Techstars Co-CEO on Coaching Startups to Define Culture

“I think that culture is one of the few problems that you have to address before they’re problems,” says TechStars co-founder and co-CEO David Brown. “If you’re struggling to figure out how to grow sales, you can wait until sales are in trouble and still turn it around. But if you wait until you’re in trouble with culture, it’s really hard to turn that boat.”

LBMA Podcast: Gimbal & Drawbridge, Brightcodes, Wirecard & Garmin

On this week’s Location-Based Marketing association podcast: Phunware + Kontakt.io, Dstillery teams up with Captivate, Gimbal buys Drawbridge, Brightcodes, Wirecard + Garmin, Ericsson Emodo, Sao Paulo’s Yellow Line, Circle K goes Coke, Locomizer patent.

Street Fight Daily: GDPR Is Here and Complaints Are Being Filed, How Not to Handle Reviews

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Tech Giants Face First GDPR Complaints Over ‘Forced Consent’… Google Confirms Feed Ads Are a Test… Namogoo Releases 2018 Online Consumer Behavior Study…

Local News Pioneer Mike Orren on Industry’s Future: A Steep but Climbable Hill

“There are no silver bullets,” Mike Orren tells Tom Grubisich. Local news “has always been a complex industry, and advertising, marketing services, managing the print demand—all are going to continue to be a part of the equation.”

What Happens When Knowledge Panels Aren’t Actually Knowledgeable?

In the latest of their biweekly columns, David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal explore what they find to be a troubling practice on Google’s part: granting select platforms the power to insert themselves into a local business’ knowledge panel without any recourse for the business or verifying that the information is accurate.