News and Analysis

Fast Brings New Headless Checkout Capabilities to Live Events

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Buyers can purchase a seller’s product in one click, directly from a Fast Checkout button on a review page, an email, or another digital avenue. That means Fast’s new headless checkout system could be a big payday for certain digital publishers and bloggers as well as live events.

Reveal Mobile Acquires OOH Location Intelligence Startup Mira

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The acquisition creates what Reveal describes as the first ad tech SaaS platform to provide attribution reports for online-to-offline, offline-to-online, and offline-to-offline marketing campaigns. The company will be bringing Mira’s entire team onboard.

Bluefin Wants to Devalue Your Data

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For those not in the know, talk of a company wanting to devalue their company’s data might inspire fears of ruthless competitors coming to steal a precious resource. But in fact, Bluefin, the company whose core mission is devaluing data, does not want to steal your information; it wants to shield your data from that very outcome.

Commentary

LBMA Vidcast: Amazon’s StyleSnap, Coca Cola’s Summer Wrist Bands

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On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Wrangler Jeans + Old Town Road, The North Face + Spotify, SingleCut Beersmiths plays trivia, Amazon’s StyleSnap, Coca-Cola’s summer wrist bands, ProYo + InMarket. Special: 2019 LBMA Global Location Trends Report.

Fostering Brand-Customer Relationships in the Age of Social Checkout and Chatbots

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Currently, 74% of consumers visit the social media pages of brands to inspire future purchases. And as evidenced by the popularity of Instagram Checkout, sales tools like Apple Business Chat, and new ad products like Google‘s Shoppable Ads, the industry is rapidly moving towards commerce that removes the friction between inspiration and an actual purchase.

But when the path to purchase is shortened, so is the opportunity for brand and customer to interact, which is probably what attracted your customers in the first place. Especially in the world of social media, brand persona is an enduring element that differentiates your brand and creates fans out of customers.

The good news is, you don’t have to sacrifice brand voice for a social commerce strategy. In fact, with the right tools, you can enhance it.

AR Impacts Local Commerce, Disrupting Home Services and Retail

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AR is emerging at a time when the physical retail world is undergoing significant transformation. Things like Amazon Go stores and the counteractive “retail as a service” movement have raised awareness and hunger for retail evolution. So AR’s retail shopping use cases fall on fertile soil.

But retail is just one way that AR intersects with local commerce. AR comes into play in another key local commerce category: home services. Innovators like Streem are bringing remote assistance to traditional service calls (think: busted pipe).

Latest Posts

#SFSW18: The Local Ecosystem in Flux

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“Small businesses are people who are gutting it out,” said Andrew Morbitzer, VP of corporate development at GoDaddy. “They’re here to do a service or provide a product. They’re not here to use software. [Our job is] removing the decision to take on another capability.”

Out of Its Rocky Recent Past, Philly.com Seeks to Be ‘Indispensable’

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Philadelphia Media Network is building its future around a reorganized and united news operation that aims to produce more engaging editorial content with fewer editors and reporters and sell the package to readers of Philly.com for $2.99 a week after 10 free views. We recently caught up with PMN Editor and VP Gabriel Escobar to discuss this strategy.

Street Fight Daily: Mobile/Social/Video Dominate Ad Spending, Facebook’s Missing Video Metrics

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Trifecta of Mobile, Social, and Video Thrives While Print Declines… How Do We Measure Facebook’s Video Biz? It Still Hasn’t Told Us… For Third Oldest American Retailer, More Data and Business Hasn’t Meant More Advertising…

What Alignable’s New Trust Ratings Mean for Loyalty Vendors

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Based on the results in Alignable’s 2018 Q1 Small Business Trust Index, the three least trusted categories of vendors include legal, hiring and people management, and loyalty and rewards. Alignable’s findings were based on Net Promoter Score ranges and averages for each products and services category.

With Visibility Manager, MomentFeed Optimizes the Local Data Foundation

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In a bid to provide multi-location brands with better insights into the health of their digital storefronts, the marketing and customer experience management platform MomentFeed is launching a new product dubbed Visibility Manager, the company announced this morning.

Street Fight Daily: Facebook to Elevate Local News, Amazon Go Shifts Retail Paradigms

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook to Push More Local News Stories into Feed… How Amazon Go Will Drive Brands to Develop New Ways to Target Customers… Consumer Time Spent on Publisher Sites Fell in 2017…

Q&A: Does Google’s Latest Product Mean Death by a Thousand Cuts for Brands

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Google really left businesses hanging with the Q&A release, Mike BLumenthal tells David Mihm in their biweekly column: “We had enough engineering cycles that we could “step into the breach” of what is obviously a big brand problem. Whether it is long term or not depends on what Google can parse from the questions in terms of improving results. “

Selling to Multi-Location Brands: Sizing Up the Prospects

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Multi-location brands have been a little slower to embrace digital technologies in support of their local marketing and advertising than SMBs, but that’s changing pretty fast. The biggest of those companies still tend to be a little conservative, but they’re shifting digital spending towards local and adopting a broader variety of tactics.

Street Fight Daily: Google Tests DIY Local-News App, Twitter Adds New Ad Tactic for Brands

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Is Testing a New App That Would Let Anyone Publish Local News Stories… Twitter Now Lets Advertisers Sponsor Publishers’ Moments… Morgan Stanley Says Amazon’s Red-Hot Ad Biz Not a Threat to Duopoly…

Street Culture: A Culture of Growth at PacketZoom

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“Introducing [new employees] to the culture has been very important; it’s important that the people we hire are growth-oriented,” PacketZoom co-founder Chetan Ahuja says. “We want them to already be useful to the business, but their main goal is to grow and to grow with the company. They’re much more valuable that way.”