News and Analysis
Jeff Glueck Passes the Torch as David Shim Steps up to Foursquare CEO
Shim now faces the challenge of steering a fast-growing tech business through uncertain times for data-driven companies. While location tech is a lucrative business that provides crucial insights for brick-and-mortar companies and has yet to hit peak productivity, the industry is also facing concerns of an unprecedented scale about how much it knows about the people who power its insights.
TripAdvisor Buys Listings, Menu Management Company SinglePlatform
As SinglePlatform’s name suggests, the acquisition is a sign of changing and challenging times for search-related internet businesses. Facing pressure from a Google juggernaut that is increasingly mapping out any imaginable search experience on its own properties, digital services that connect consumers with restaurants or places to visit when traveling are consolidating, aiming to offer holistic information that keeps searchers coming back.
Mobile Drives Sales on Black Friday
Data from ShopperTrak showed a 3% decline in traffic at physical stores on Thanksgiving and Black Friday even though sales were up overall. That’s because retailers with strong online shopping programs saw significant gains, with a reported $9.2 billion spent on Cyber Monday alone.
In an analysis of holiday shopping campaigns, the people-based marketing platform LiveIntent found that brands had a “robust” performance on Black Friday weekend. Total conversions during Black Friday weekend stood at 36% higher than that typical time period. Retailers that pushed mobile shopping saw the greatest gains, as LiveIntent’s analysis found that mobile drove the most traffic.
Commentary
AR and VR — Will Local Advertisers Bite?
Local advertising is a $150 billion market, and is particularly conducive to AR, given the technology’s ability to qualify purchase decisions in the commerce-heavy offline world. There will be a land grab for this digital real estate as mobile AR gains consumer traction. There will be also questions about who “owns” that virtual space.
How Brands Determine Their Local Marketing Effectiveness
Website analytics are the most popular means of evaluating local marketing for multi-location brands. While that’s a logical tactic for analyzing digital marketing and advertising effectiveness, it hardly presents the full picture of multichannel marketing or online-to-offline attribution.
Latest Posts
How Dashboards Are Shaping the Way Marketers Manage Local Campaigns
Vendors are pulling out all the stops to help small and mid-size businesses acquire and retain a higher percentage of their customers. And as merchants increase the number of platforms they use for local promotions, they’re relying more heavily on dashboards to correlate their digital efforts with financial successes.
A Promising New Start on News Collaboration, but There’s Another Non-Starter as Well
Next week, the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in suburban North Jersey will launch a local/national partnership project that could promote collaboration between news organizations. Meanwhile, a newspaper in Milwaukee could benefit from this kind of collaboration.
Street Fight Daily: Instagram Boosts Brands’ Customer Service, AI-Powered Assistants on the Rise
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Useful for Social and Marketing, Instagram Now Helps Brands with Customer Service, Too… NuTonomy Debuts Self-Driving Cabs, Beating the Likes of Uber and Google to the Punch… Digital Media Specialist Warns Against the Hazards of ‘Over-Targeting’…
Pitney Bowes MD: Data Integration Sets the Best Location Companies Apart
What makes location data actionable and location-based marketing effective — and what do recent success stories like Pokemon Go foretell for the location data industry? Street Fight recently caught up with Joe Francica, managing director of geospatial solutions at Pitney Bowes, to talk about the best practices in location data.
Bringing Brands Into the Fold, inMarket Touts Its ‘Three-Sided’ Beacon Network
inMarket’s strategic product is not the app, the value is created by their network. Their network links dozens of publishers’ apps to retailers that host inMarket beacons and, the third stakeholder in the network, the brands, whose products are being promoted. In this video, CEO Todd DiPaola talks about the importance of this network.
Street Fight Daily: Google to Penalize Intrusive Mobile Ads, Facebook Improves Slideshow Ads
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… As Mobile Ads Grow More Crucial, Google Pledges to Crack Down on ‘Intrusive Interstitials’… Facebook Improves Its ‘Lightweight Video’ Slideshow Ads, Provides Support for Mobile Ad Creation… Most U.S. Publishers Rely on Both Ad Support, Subscriptions…
Factual’s Rob Jonas: Location Tech Still Has Some Big Problems to Solve
Factual has been working over the past year to build out location data partnerships with a variety of agencies and brands. We recently caught up with Rob Jonas, the company’s SVP of revenue, to talk about where Factual sees local heading and why the location data space isn’t as crowded as general adtech.
7 Ways National Brands Can Localize Email Marketing Campaigns
Going local with an email campaign can be as simple as segmenting lists by city and including the addresses of local stores or as involved as editing the copy to reflect regional purchasing trends and language dialects. The end goal remains the same: to ground the business in the local community and give customers a sense of trust.
After the Brand Battle: The Final Score
The nine Brand Battles demonstrated true commitment to local branding by nearly all of the companies that competed – but fights over best data quality, superior customer engagement and reviews were intense, and the scores were close. Out of the five areas where Brandify collected data, the point of attack in local SEO and advertising proved that a clear strategy equals clear winners…
Street Fight Daily: Lyft Disputes Sale Report, OpenStreetMap Debuts Crowdsourced Street View
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Factual’s Rob Jonas: Location Tech Still Has Some Big Problems to Solve… Lyft President Says Company Was Never Looking for a Buyer… Many Businesses Can’t Assess the Digital Customer’s Experience…
The Road Ahead: What Autonomous Cars Teach Us About Marketing Automation