News and Analysis

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Retailers on Edge as Delta Variant Spreads

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School supplies and backpacks should be flying off the shelves right now, but growing concerns over the Covid-19 Delta variant are prompting more families to hold off on back-to-school shopping and make essential purchases online.

Why Content Is Replacing Clicks as the Cornerstone of Digital Marketing

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While the click-oriented advertising model is not going away and has its place, it is becoming more complicated with the influx of privacy changes that make targeting and measurement harder. As a result, VRTCAL Founder and President Todd Wooten makes the argument that content is king again.

Innovation Brief: TikTok, NBC & Roku

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On a semi-weekly basis, Street Fight’s Innovation Brief series aggregates and analyzes happenings from across the technology and media spheres. This week, we look at TikTok Stories, NBC’s Olympics viewership, and Roku’s new originals play.

Commentary

AI Is No Magic Bullet for Policing Hateful Content

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The task Facebook must take up as it attempts to police hateful content is one inseparable from political values, human judgment, and the interpretation of statements that need to be parsed by well-trained eyes and bright minds with a stomach for horror to boot. While machines will play an indispensable role in content moderation on a platform of Facebook’s scale, they will be far from sufficient. That’s because monitoring hate speech touches on nothing less than some of humanistic inquiry’s age-old questions: the debatable violence, status of truth, and foundations of meaning in language.

The Role of Location in Attribution

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Let’s face it—we are a long way from being able to show that digital campaigns, and most other advertising formats, resulted in specific in-store sales. There are simply too many unconnected data silos to stitch together meaningful and statistically relevant results. The ad seen on TV can’t inform your phone or laptop that it’s also seen the ad, while the point-of-sale system or online checkout can’t notify those previous touch points to confirm the sale occurred. So if the scale of accurate location data prevents it from being a true stand-alone solution for proving attribution, what role will it play?

Lead Gen Spam: Bad for the Consumer, Bad for Business, and Bad for the Local Ecosystem

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Blumenthal to Mihm, on lead gen spam: The real issue for me is that Google Maps is really like a public utility, and Google is not doing enough to protect the consumers of that product. There is significant harm in the deception of the consumer, the blocking out of legitimate businesses, and the possibility that the consumer public will lose trust in the whole, creaky house of cards.

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Black Friday Was a Bonanza, SoftBank Tries to Buy Uber Shares at a Discount

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Black Friday Sales, Click Rates Soar… SoftBank Will Try to Buy Uber Shares at a 30% Discount… Amazon Expands Its Influence on Video Infrastructure…

How Far Can Google Local Services Expand?

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Regardless of what Google thinks is in the best interest of the searcher, the company has “no choice but to accelerate their monetization in Local to keep their revenues growing at a healthy clip and Wall Street happy,” David mihm tells Mike Blumenthal in their biweekly column.

Smaller Newspapers Are Doing Just Fine, Thank You, New Report Finds

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Smaller-market papers, with 50,000 or smaller print circulation, are doing quite well overall compared with their larger counterparts, according to the new report by Damian Radcliffe and Christopher Ali. In this Q & A, Ali explains the contrary success of these numerous smaller papers.

Street Fight Daily: What the Time Sale Portends for Media, Moment of Truth Approaches for Uber

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… What the Blockbuster Sale of Time Inc Means for the Media… Here’s What You Need to Know About Softbank’s Tender Offer for Uber Coming Tomorrow… As Amazon Marketing Grows, Agencies Sees an Opportunity…

Openings and New Hires at Empyr, Vistar Media, LotLinx

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Every two weeks, Geoff Michener covers some of the latest openings and new hires in this dynamic industry. This week’s edition includes moves and new openings at SurePath Capital Partners, Brandify, and Foursquare.

Street Fight Daily: Snap Selling New Type of Ad, Net Neutrality Repeal Could Affect Marketers

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Snapchat Is Selling a New Type of Ad in Time for the Holidays: Promoted Stories… Marketers Fear the FCC’s Plan to Kill Net Neutrality Could Affect Advertising Prices… Advertisers Express Interest in Bringing Programmatic In-House..

How the End of Network Neutrality Could Affect SMBs and the Public Interest

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For many years, the government’s assessment of the public interest was to encourage Web access to all. The current FCC, however, contends that this position is better met by eliminating the net neutrality rules — that SMBs will be able to have a variety of ISP options based on their actual needs with the end of the net neutrality rules.

Street Fight Daily: Uber Hid 2016 Data Breach from Users, Huge Ad Fraud Scheme Uncovered

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Uber Hid a 2016 Data Breach That Affected 57 Million People And Paid Off the Hackers… Fake-Ad Operation Used to Steal from Publishers Is Uncovered… The NYT Is Making All of Its Ads Available Programmatically…

Social Media Gets the Local Spending Growth, Partly by Default

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Social media is widely used — and deemed particularly effective — by SMBs. But when you dig deeper, it looks like most local marketers are using social media as substitute for display advertising (and to reach mobile audiences) rather than as a uniquely local or even “social” medium.

Sponsored Content: Optimizing Map Listings to Drive Search Results

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In this article, we will take a close look at the role that maps and map listings, such as Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Bing Maps, are playing in the local search ecosystem. We will delve into how the data from those services is driving desktop, mobile, and voice search.