News and Analysis
Influencer Marketing Stands Out during Pandemic
Covid-19 is capable of producing a special kind of advertising fatigue in which consumers tire of receiving a maelstrom of indistinguishable messages from brands: This is an especially uncertain time. Here are the precautions we’re taking. This is what we’re doing to help out.
It’s not that these messages aren’t necessary, especially as they relate to safety precautions. The fatigue comes from the unrelenting sameness and impersonal character of the content. That’s where influencer marketers can prove to be a brand’s special weapon, and a new report by influencer marketing platform Linqia suggests marketers are capitalizing on the channel.
The Video Ad Market’s Challenges and Future
Short-form video platform Quibi drew a slew of mainstream headlines beyond advertising trade publications for far underperforming expectations. The platform’s execs blamed its relative failure on coronavirus.
While coronavirus alone may not explain the fate of Quibi, the virus and related drops in economic and social activity have left the video ad market in a paradoxical state. Viewership is up; ad demand is down. To explain the state of the market and where it’s headed, Tal Chalozin, CTO and co-founder of video ad platform Innovid, spoke to Street Fight.
Location Data Firm Unacast Generates Hyperlocal Covid Recovery Metrics
Location data and analytics firm Unacast is hoping its new recovery analytics tool might guide businesses through this chaotic time. The interactive tool allows retail operations professionals, real estate developers, and property management companies to drill down to the census block level to get visibility into real-world economic recovery scenarios and plan for future investments.
Using data that compares real-time public behavior in the current environment to pre-Covid time periods, businesses can estimate recovery rates and more accurately plan for future reopenings.
Commentary
How Publishers Can Survive Facebook Churn: Top Expert Weighs In — Part II
“The smaller scale might be an advantage when it comes to trust,” Grzegorz Piechota told Tom Grubisich. “Local publishers can offer services Facebook will never be able to provide at a global scale such as checking all the facts, verifying all the ads, or providing a 100% guarantee of brand-safe context.”
How to Turn Alternative Data into Alpha
The need for real-time data is critical, as it enhances the speed and accuracy of key decisions and enables investors to detect any defects before making a choice.
Localized Insights Mean More Precise Campaigns and Better ROI
While creating at scale makes economic and operational sense, the danger in going with a one-size-fits-all approach is not insignificant. Evidence suggests over half of such “national” initiatives fail.
Latest Posts
Mobile 1.0 Had Its Own Uber: Recalling the Birth of the Future
Somewhere in the nascent days of flip-phones, when I headed up AOL’s mobile products division, we came across a little company with an ambitious goal: let people hail a cab or black car virtually using their cellphones. The company, Qsent, had been working on a mobile-phone version of a service called iQtaxi.
How Retailers Are Personalizing the Shopping Experience This Holiday Season
The biggest story this holiday shopping season isn’t expected to be any specific toy or garment that’s flying off the shelves, but the way consumers are being recognized and how they’re finding the products they ultimately purchase when they shop inside physical stores. With holiday retail sales expected to increase just 1.8% this year, retailers […]
Street Fight Daily: Lyft Revs Up Local Marketing, Pinterest Aggressively Adds Ad-Tech Partners
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Lyft Revs Up Its Local Marketing Efforts… Pinterest Adds 15 Ad Tech Companies to Beef Up Its Data and Measurement Game… T-Mobile Launching Device to Make Most Any Car ‘Connected’…
Snapchat, Uber, and the Implications of Machine Learning
Machine learning and predictive analytics need to meld seamlessly with core app functionality. The technology needs to “just work,” without steep learning curves or frustrating dead ends. So I’d expect any company who experiments with machine learning for local search to start with a simple set of problems and hone the user experience.
The Accelerating Consolidation of the Digital Ad Market
“The flow of dollars from businesses of all sizes has clearly been away from lower-performance niche platforms into boosted Facebook posts,” writes David Mihm. “We can debate the value of that activity, but relative to the questionable/delayed/opaque performance of so many digital ad products, Facebook seems to have found a sweet spot.”
Voice Search Profoundly Changes the Way Consumers Interact on Mobile
Sponsoered content: Business listings are an important part of voice searches, particularly when “near me” searches are involved. Localized searches may see an even more rapid shift to voice than other searches, based on consumers’ increasing comfort with using hands-free devices in the car or when their eyes are otherwise occupied while outside the home.
Street Fight Daily: Facebook-WhatsApp Data Sharing Blocked Abroad, OpenTable Scales Back
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Runs Into Roadblock Abroad Taking User Data from WhatsApp for Targeted Ads… As OpenTable Struggles to Take Hold Abroad, Priceline Scales It Back… Uber Rival Karhoo Shuts Down After Blowing Reported $250M in Funding…
Report: Airports Could Be the Next Big Beacon Hubs
In U.S airports, we don’t see as much beacon activity as we might expect, but a new report by Unacast’s proximity marketing network service, Proxbook, indicates that by 2019, 84% of all global airports will be involved in a deployment or a trial project with beacons or other proximity sensors.
Just How Big a Deal Are Voice Search and Chatbots for Local?
At Street Fight Summit we raised a little controversy around the potential disruptiveness of voice search to the hyperlocal economy. Street Fight believes voice search is a critical emerging technology, a view that seemingly contrasts with that of many companies on the supply side of hyperlocal.
Street Fight Daily: Google Begins Mobile-First Indexing, Apple News Drives Traffic for Pubs
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Begins Mobile-First Indexing, Using Mobile Content For All Search Rankings… Apple News Drives Significant Traffic for Some Publishers, But Measurement Remains Iffy… The Economist Turns to LinkedIn over Pinterest and Tumblr…
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Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem