News and Analysis

Contextual Ads Power Sophisticated Content Strategies in Privacy Era

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As the advertising industry turns back toward contextual, marketers will find a much more advanced technology than the one they may equate with the term. The privacy-safe ad method isn’t just serving up sneaker ads anymore; it’s powering sophisticated, content-based brand campaigns across multiple channels and target audiences.

Scorpion Expands Its Toolbox with Yelp Partnership

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The digital marketing services provider Scorpion announced a new partnership with Yelp this morning, in a move that demonstrates just how important Yelp’s advertising platform has become to the local ecosystem. Scorpion clients will have access to Yelp tools like zip code targeting, campaign goals, negative keywords, and other pilot programs that take a granular and customized approach to ad delivery. They will also be able to optimize their Yelp presence and unlock new profile optimizations that weren’t previously available.

Where Location Intelligence Stands as Foursquare Founder Steps Back

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The story of Foursquare reflects what the evolution of smartphones and location technology allowed marketers to achieve — unprecedented awareness of where consumers are and how to cater to them on that basis. But data privacy concerns are pushing the narrative into new territory.

Commentary

The Blind Spot in Facebook’s Vision of Privacy

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Insofar as Facebook’s pivot to privacy fails to reward its users for the data that has made it one of the world’s most powerful and profitable companies, I see it as a modest change that is more reactive than proactive, more inevitable than forward-thinking. It is likely that Facebook is only beginning to lay out its moves on privacy, and more ambitious changes may lie ahead. But for now, when it comes to the most pressing, fundamental ethical challenges that are inciting political fervor and increasing the likelihood that serious regulation of Big Tech is on the way, Zuckerberg is dragging his feet. With visionaries like Lanier and Zuboff raising public awareness about Facebook’s business model, the truth may just catch up with him.

Things Not Strings: Google’s New Hotel Profiles Exemplify Its Approach to Entities

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Google’s Knowledge Graph ambitions are expanding to include obviating heavy reliance on secondary sources like Wikipedia and being able instead to classify and cross-reference information as a native, self-sustaining activity on web pages themselves. That’s what makes a recent patent filing different from the evidence of the Knowledge Graph we’ve already seen in the wild.

While this more ambitious way of surfacing information about entities is not yet standard, in researching Google’s new interface for hotels, I think I’m seeing evidence of a real-world example.

LBMA Vidcast: Octopus Ads in Ubers and Lyfts, Walmart and Google Team Up on Voice

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On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Neiman Marcus + SalesFloor, Octopus ads in Uber & Lyft, Cleveland Cavaliers + Aramark use Apple business chat for food orders, CVS + Shipt, Snapchat testing “Status” feature, Walmart + Google voice ordering.

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Lord & Taylor Sells Online With Walmart, Retailers Embrace Smaller Stores

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Lord & Taylor Agrees to Start Selling on Walmart.com… Retailers Embrace Small-Format Stores in Age of E-Commerce… Marketing Budgets Ebb as Brands Demand Results…

Google Local Service Ads: Ready for Primetime

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“While I do think this is about a new revenue stream in new categories and cleaning up spammy industries the rebranding might just also be an effort (unusual for Google) brand clarity around their Google Home product,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm in their bi-weekly column..

Deep Dive Into Facebook Finds Dim Revenue Hopes for News Sites

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Grzegorz Piechota, a digital strategist for news media companies worldwide, talked with Street Fight recently about his research into Facebook for WAN-IFRA and what his findings may augur for publishers in their quest for more revenue from the platforms, especially at the local level.

Street Fight Daily: Facebook Sets Sights on Yelp and Foursquare, Uber Approves $10B SoftBank Deal

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Relaunches Events App as Facebook Local… Uber Approves SoftBank’s Multi-Billion Dollar Investment Offer… Spirited Media Fights Collapse of Local News…

Learning to Work on Your Startup Even While Executing on the Day-to-Day

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“Some of the best companies you couldn’t define their market size on day one,” says Foundry Group’s Brad Feld. “Nobody has any idea what their market sizes are. Others a lot of times you think the market size is X and it’s either an order of magnitude bigger or smaller. “

LBMA Podcast: Honda France, American Eagle, UpCurve buys Closely

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This Week in Location Based Marketing is a weekly video podcast from the Location Based Marketing Association with Asif Khan and Rob Woodbridge. On the show: Macallan, Locus Labs + Acuity Brands, Amazon & Fexy Media, Lufthansa, Brandify. Case Study from Shopkick.

Street Fight Daily: Inside Snap’s Messy IPO, SoftBank Deal Looms for Uber

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Kept Doubters Mum… Uber CEO Says the SoftBank Deal Hasn’t Happened Yet But Will… The Bumpy Road Ahead for AI in Sales, Customer Service…

Adxcel Rebrands as Artsai, Using AI to Consolidate the Marketing Stack

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“We optimize the entire customer lifecycle journey,” says Artsai’s CRO Erik Lundberg. ” We may help someone acquire a new customer on Facebook, then reengage user on programmatic or RTB [real-time bidding], and then help drive the user to make a purchase inside the marketer’s mobile app or landing page.”

Why DNAinfo’s Shuttering Isn’t a Reflection on the Hyperlocal Digital Opportunity

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The shuttering of these sites was a failure of a business, not a failure of opportunity. The opportunity is there. A multi-billion dollar opportunity. It just needs the right model and good execution to grasp it.

Looking at Location Signals, GroundTruth Looks at Ways to Predict Behavior

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A recent study by the company focused on the foot traffic at mass merchandisers and grocery stores and airport traffic, and pointed to the NC city as the best choice for Amazon’s HQ2. “Being able to dig in to real world behaviors, it draws out real actionable recommendations,” says Sarah Ohle, VP of marketing insights.