News and Analysis
October Theme: Hybrid Holidays
Last year, facing peak Covid contagion with no vaccines available, Street Fight dubbed its annual month of holiday-related retail and marketing coverage “home for the holidays.” This year, brands face a more uncertain landscape: hybrid holidays.
Yelp Introduces Guest Manager, A Front-of-House Operations Tool for Restaurants
Yelp today introduced a new, comprehensive solution for restaurants to manage their front-of-house operations. With online searches for takeout remaining above pre-pandemic levels, the new Yelp Guest Manager is being billed as a comprehensive solution that brings together many of the digital tools restaurants have been using to manage digital ordering, reservations, takeout, guest loyalty, and table management.
How Apple’s Latest Privacy Changes Will Affect Email Marketing
Last week, Apple rolled out iOS 15, which brought more privacy changes that could undermine tracking and disadvantage digital marketers. Most notably, the company’s Mail Privacy Protection policy will ask iOS device users whether they want to “protect” their mail or not, preventing marketers from determining whether consumers who “protect” their email opened messages.
Commentary
The Promise of XR and 5G
As we approach the 5G era, the dramatic quantum leap of 5G service enhances many creative capabilities in XR, providing richer user experiences and giving marketers and developers a larger digital playground to expand their creative talents.
Still, there’s confusion in the market over how these innovations work and, critically, how they can work together. Let’s take a closer look.
Will Google Ask Businesses to Pay for Listings?
Google recently sent surveys to a number of Google My Business (GMB) users, asking a range of questions about their local marketing activities and their level of interest in certain paid features within GMB. The survey suggests that Google is at least thinking about a paid version of the GMB feature set. For the local search industry, a paid GMB product offered to businesses of all types could be quite disruptive, especially if it ended up gradually degrading the value of organic listings.
Voice Marketing Starts with Smart SEO
How can enterprises better leverage voice search for brand marketing? To start, winning in voice search demands many of the same strategies as search engine optimization (SEO), as the goal in both cases is to get your content to rank position zero on search engine results pages (SERPs) by focusing on authority.
Latest Posts
LBMA Podcast: Accor Hotels, Waze + Allstate Insurance, Target
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: Modern Adventure, EU’s geo-blocking, Ozmosis, Macy’s + NBCU + Verizon, Qualcomm Ventures invests in Wiliot.
Street Fight Daily: Online Ad Prices Rise, How Digital Brands Can Mirror Amazon’s Holiday Success
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Online Ad Prices Rise As Industry Combats Counterfeit Inventory, a Good Sign for Publishers… What E-Commerce Brands Can Learn from Amazon for Holiday Domination… Publishers Scramble to Make Their Annual Sales Numbers…
McClatchy’s Chris Hendricks Signs Off After a Long Digital-First Career
McClatchy’s Chris Hendricks has often been my GPS on where daily newspapers, including his company, were in finding their legs on the constantly shifting ground of digital publishing. But starting tomorrow morning, I won’t be able to get any more positional readouts from Hendricks.
Thunder CEO Sees Both Media and Creative Strategy Changing in 2018
Rather than applying marketing information based on devices, marketers will increasingly be able to target actual people, Wong told Street Fight in an interview. Knowledge about customers is more precise, and that’s going to change both the media and the creative strategy.
Street Fight Daily: Social & Mobile Video Dominate Ad Spend, Pubs Go Brick-and-Mortar
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Forrester: Walled Gardens and Mobile Video Will Dominate the Future of Ad Spend… Publishers Set Up Shop on the Streets for the Holidays… BuzzFeed Is Laying Off 100 Employees After Missing Revenue Goals…
Moe’s Seeks Personalization and Efficiency by Implementing Drive-Thru Kiosks
Street Fight recently checked in with Darryl Nagao, franchise partner running thirty-three Moe’s locations, to find out how this restaurant chain is leveraging digital technologies to deliver the culinary variety of a fast-casual along with the efficiency of a QSR.
Foot Traffic Analysis Shows Height of Black Friday Retail Bump
The 2017 holiday shopping season is off to a healthy start, with consumer spending on Black Friday reaching a record $5 billion. Data from ShopperTrak shows that traffic at brick-and-mortar stores decreased less than 1% from Black Friday last year, which is actually good news compared to what some analysts had been fearing.
Street Fight Daily: Shoppers Swarm to Social, Snapchat’s Redesign Goes Live
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… More Facebook and Instagram Users Discussed Last Weekend’s Shopping than Super Bowl… Snapchat Simplifies Design to Spur Use… Benchmark and Menlo Commit to Sell Shares of Uber to SoftBank…
How Much Should We Still Care About Duplicate Content?
There has been a belief that duplicate content — although it is not cause for a penalty, unless it appears deceptive — hurts the overall quality of the website. Therefore, for years, duplicate content has been on a website audit checklist as an item to fix. But is that still the case?
Sponsored Content: Managing a Coordinated Local Presence Management Strategy
Surveys of both SMBs and enterprise local marketers show that both use a variety of marketing channels, so evaluating each channel’s effectiveness on its own, and then coordinating marketing programs across those channels, is important. But marketing channels fuel each other and produce multiplier effects.
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Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem