News and Analysis

Innovation Brief: Yum Brands, Discord, and Robots

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Welcome to Street Fight’s new Innovation Brief series. On a semi-weekly basis, it aggregates and analyzes happenings from across the technology and media spheres. This week, we look at text-to-order QSR, Microsoft’s Discord ambitions, and Boston Dynamics’ latest. 

What Substack’s Success Portends for Digital Marketing

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Substack’s success points to the power of email as a means of owning an audience, which will only grow in importance as privacy restrictions proliferate.

GroundTruth Acquires Self-Serve Local Ad Platform Addy

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The acquisition is part of GroundTruth’s push to equip small businesses with the kinds of location marketing and ad tech-driven solutions previously available only to big brands.

Commentary

Choice: The Ingredient That Drives Higher Mobile Engagement Across All Marketing Use Cases

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Dan Slavin: To appeal to all consumers, you must use a mix of mobile channels, such as text, mobile wallet, and apps. Your consumers have a specific preference when it comes to receiving retailer promotional messages. Your mobile marketing strategy must cater to this preference.

LBMA Vidcast: Postmates Locks Down $100M, Walgreens Hooks Up With Microsoft

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On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Coty’s AR smart mirror for hair, JDA + InContext for in-store ops, Postmates gets $100M, Safegraph launches IP-to-Place, Germany says no to Amazon Dash, Walgreens partners with Microsoft.

Omnichannel Optimization: What’s Changing (and What Isn’t) in Post-Screen Search

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For brand marketers, addressing the expansion of local search into voice and visual contexts is really a matter of digging in and getting more involved with rich local context that appears to grow more expansive by the day. Google alone has introduced a vast array of opportunities for business to differentiate themselves from the competition, including photos, videos, 360° virtual tours, business descriptions, menus, Posts, reviews, and several other features.

Latest Posts

Case Study: How an Unusual, Soft-Sell Sponsored Post Turned Readers Into Customers

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“I tried to think about everything I hated about sponsored posts and do the opposite,” says Aaron Seyedian, the founder of Well Paid Maids. “As a reader, I find that sponsored posts on blogs are often lengthy, impersonal and overly centered on sales. I set out to write a post that would be succinct and personal.”

Street Fight Daily: How Google Cashes in on AI, Uber CEO Says IPO 18-36 Months Out

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google and Microsoft Can Use AI to Extract Billions More in Ad Dollars from Clicks… New Uber CEO Says Company Could Go Public in 18 Months… Coming Soon to Facebook Watch: Sponsored Shows…

Report: Matching Up With Local Merchants’ Marketing Objectives

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Our analysis of local merchants shows that SMBs are spending more money on digital marketing — particularly social media and email — because they find those channels most effective. But there appears to be some missing links between new customer acquisition and their favorite tactics.

Is Your Local Dealership Prepared for a New Era of Car Buying?

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The automotive space is extremely competitive and with automotive sales down 13.2 percent, the competition could not be fiercer. In order to remain afloat in today’s challenging sales environment, auto marketers need to rethink how they get high-intent buyers to their stores.

Street Fight Daily: Microsoft & Amazon Integrate Cortana/Alexa, USA Today Personalizes Homepage

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… In Surprising Move, Microsoft and Amazon Integrate Voice Assistants… USA Today’s Facebook-Like, Personalized Mobile Site Succeeds in Grabbing User Attention… For New Uber CEO, Fresh Challenges Already Emerge…

Captivate Adds Content Partners in Push for a 360-Degree Ad Solution

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The company has 12 new content providers joining its digital place-based media network target consumers on screens in thousands of building elevators and lobbies across the U.S. The partners include Vox Media, Bloomberg, Billboard, Quartz, and The Hollywood Reporter, as well as Stadium sports video content.

Hearst’s Barrett on Talks With Facebook: Progress, but More Needs to Happen

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The president of Hearst Newspapers Digital Media, details what he sees as the current promise of Facebook’s nascent effort to promote subscriptions for local news publishers, and assesses the state of other major, yet-to-be-resolved issues for the publishers as they weigh their future on and with the tech giant.

How Wells Fargo Connects Locally Via Sports, Philanthropy, and Digital

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Gary Korotzer, EVP of marketing and brand strategy and community bank marketing for Wells Fargo, says that through a mix of efforts the bank weaves its way into the day-to-day lives and needs of its customers.

Street Fight Daily: Self-Driving Cars Now Deliver Pizzas, Amazon Expands Advertising

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Ford and Domino’s to Deliver Pizza Using Self-Driving Cars in New Test… Amazon Grows Its Programmatic Ad Business… Uber’s CEO Choice Faces a Question of Ambitions…

The Fallacy of Google’s “Micro-Moment” Positioning

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“I see the customer journey as the customer journey wherever it leads,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm. “I see Google’s efforts to oversimplify it into discrete points in time as a gross form of reductionism that doesn’t help us understand that journey better. “