News and Analysis

Street Fight’s September Theme: Mapping the Future

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What does “Mapping the Future” entail? As a primary tool for consumer local search and discovery, mapping continues to undergo UX innovations and structural changes. We’ll examine these areas as well as mapping’s interplay with local search and SEO strategies.

Though mapping is more of a Street Fight staple than a trending topic, market signals indicate that the timing is right. In fact, we already got started last month with a look at Snapchat’s moves into local mapping — not just UX upgrades to Snap Map but also self-serve advertising for local businesses.

Ad Tech and Privacy

California Attorney General Targets “Low-Hanging Fruit” for CCPA Non-Compliance

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The California Consumer Privacy Act enforcement period began July 1, and two months later, numerous firms have received letters from the attorney general’s office about noncompliance. Multiple major companies, including Walmart, Sephora, and Ring, have been hit with class-action lawsuits.

But there’s no great mystery or nefarious agenda tied to the companies that have been targeted as this point, says Dan Clarke, president at IntraEdge. To avoid meeting the same fate, companies need to adhere to the fundamentals of the nation’s first major statewide privacy law. Clarke spoke with Street Fight to explain.

More Brands Are Scaling Digital Channels for Customer Engagement — Here’s Why

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Communicating with brands on social media has become the norm for consumers. Surveys show that roughly half of all consumers who engage with brands on social media are reaching out about customer care concerns, and more than 65% of social media users across all platforms expect brands to respond, regardless of whether the initial outreach was via private messages or public posts.

Those expectations have only heightened over the past six months, and many brands have had to pivot their customer support and engagement priorities on the fly.

Commentary

Why This Select List of Local News Providers Includes Only One Daily Newspaper

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A year-long study of newsrooms in the U.S. and Europe by two Danish journalists has singled out 16 local providers in the U.S. who are meeting the researchers’ main criterion: structural changes “to forge closer ties and stronger relations to their communities and audiences”—with a special focus on journalism over commerce, technology, and business models.

6 Ways to Engage Your Online Audience and Turn Visitors Into Customers

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How do you create content that will help you attract new customers, establish long-term relationships with your existing customers, and reach your business goals? Here are six practical recommendations on how to make your content marketing work.

Proving Local Attribution and ROI Remains a Top Challenge for Multi-Location Brands

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Outside of budget and time/resource constraints, local marketers at big brands and multi-location retailers continue to rate attribution and ROI as their most difficult digital marketing challenge, according to Street Fight’s latest survey. That’s similar to what they said in 2017.

Latest Posts

Affinity Solutions Launches Tool to Predict Future Purchase Outcomes

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Tech firms are working at a feverish pace to crack the code when it comes to predictive marketing, as brands demand more detailed insights into consumers’ future purchasing behaviors. The latest effort into this arena comes from Affinity Solutions, which is launching its Purchase-Driven Marketing Cloud today.

Blis Forecasts Where Consumers Will Be — Then Targets Ads Based on That Prediction

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The company is unveiling a new service that it claims can figure out where consumers will likely go — and target mobile ads based on those expectations. Blis Futures uses artificial intelligence to identify patterns about where consumers are likely to spend time, and then focuses brands’ marketing to reach them at optimal moments.

Street Fight Daily: Facebook Brings Stories to Flagship App, Voice Assistant Adoption Climbs

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Brings Stories to Its Flagship App… Voice Assistants Now Reach 12% of U.S. Households… Payment Company Square Launches in the UK…

Research Roundup: Comparing Franchisees and Independent Professionals

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Comparing some surveys focused at opposite ends of the local small business spectrum — franchise operators and self-employed professionals — it feels like, though the industry is selling these groups the same marketing and commerce technology and services, the two segments are more different than similar.

Optimizing for Mobile Search: New Tips and Old Tricks

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It used to be that you wanted to be situated as close as possible to the city centroid, or clustered with similar businesses. Now you might literally have to be the closest shop to the place your potential customer happens to be standing. How in the world do you optimize for that?

Brand Battle: Wireless Phone Companies Face Off

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To gauge how each company approaches local marketing, Brandify’s proprietary technology analyzed AT&T’s and Verizon’s store locations with focus on areas of local presence management. 4,903 AT&T locations and 4,000 Verizon locations were included in the data sample.

Street Fight Daily: Amazon’s Brick-and-Mortar Ambitions, Uber Suspends Self-Driving Cars After Crash

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google’s YouTube Has Continued Showing Objectionable Ads Despite Advertiser Pushback… Uber Takes Self-Driving Cars Off the Road After One Flips Over in Arizona… Amazon’s Ambitions Unboxed: Brick-and-Mortar Stores for Appliances, Furniture, and More…

Why the Creative Director of the Future Stands at the Crossroads of Marketing, Tech, Product, and Ads

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Think of the evolving creative director as a technological and marketing pentathlete, a dynamic force who’ll need to satisfy more than just the traditional advertising imperative. Envision a product-strategy role; that is the model to come.

Raise Report: Flow, Databerries, PlateIQ Secure New Funding

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Every two weeks, we round up some of the biggest fundraises taking place in hyperlocal marketing, commerce, and tech. This week’s edition includes new funding for EVRYTHING, Helpling, Drivemode, and Lynkos.

Street Fight Daily: Uber’s Secret Tools Undercut Competitors, Marketers Take on Google

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… ShopTalk ’17: Retail Brands Focus on Amazon ‘Work-Arounds’… Uber Employees Still Use Secret Tools to Target Drivers and Undercut Competition… Opportunity Knocks: Marketers and Media Take On Google…