News and Analysis
FedEx Stops Ground Deliveries for Amazon, Signaling Delivery War to Come
For FedEx as for the many other companies and industries Amazon has decimated over the past 20 years, the problem in confronting Amazon may turn out to be one of margins. While FedEx needs a profitable delivery business to survive, Amazon can afford to lose money on delivery and make it up with relatively free-flowing profits from Amazon Web Services and its booming ad business.
In fact, Amazon can afford, thanks to the faith and generosity of investors, to make no profits at all. No easy task, competing with that.
Marijuana Advertisers Chart Uncertain Territory with Laws in Flux
Could running ads for cannabis products put digital publishers in the crosshairs of federal regulators? It’s a question that more and more publishers are asking, even as marijuana legalization continues to spread across the U.S.
In a bid to help businesses in the cannabis industry understand what is, and isn’t, legal from an advertising perspective, Dash Two released its own guide to marijuana advertising laws. The company says it will keep its guide updated as the laws continue to evolve.
How Americans Shop Today
All industries—apparel, grocery, electronics—are affected differently by the move to e-commerce, and consumers are turning to new options, including social marketplaces, disrupting what we typically think of as digital shopping. Here are some insights on major market changes, including the key to Amazon’s dominance, the industries flouting the turn to e-commerce, and a curious preference among millennials, from a recent survey of 1,000 consumers by Signs.com.
Commentary
Are We on the Brink of a Retail Revolution?
Revolutions often happen over short periods of time and leave death and carnage in their wake. What we are experiencing today in retail is more of an evolution — a sort of “survival of the fittest” as both local and big brand retailers either embrace shifting consumer shopping patterns or face extinction.
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Sponsored Post: 9 Mobile Apps That Are Transforming Local Commerce
There is no shortage of business tools and apps available to entrepreneurs today. Technology, now more than ever before, is discovering new ways of solving old problems and enabling retailers and service providers as well as the mighty consumer to reach, share, save, buy, bid, deal, message, post and even make a phone call, anytime and from almost anywhere. …
Street Fight Daily: Co-op Marketing Battles Facebook/Google/Amazon, Lead Generation’s Future
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facing Facebook, Google, and Amazon, Brands Pool Their Data (Marketing Land)… The Future of Digital Lead Generation (TechCrunch)… Publishers ‘Feeding On Scraps from Facebook’, Says Bloomberg Media Boss (The Guardian)…
LiveIntent President: Local Publishers Need to Leverage ‘Gold Mine’ of Email Newsletters
Advertising network LiveIntent has 1,300 publisher clients, including Hearst, New York Times, Washington Post and ESPN. Through these relationships, it can target 130 million unique visitors. We caught up with the company’s president, Jason Kelly, to talk about how local publishers can compete with social-media platforms for ad revenue.
What Designing an ‘OS for Restaurants’ Really Requires
When you look at the restaurant tech stack, there are clearly solutions, software, applications that should play nicely with each other, but the larger players have purposefully walled off their gardens. The next multi-billion-dollar company in this space will identify the mission-critical pieces of technology in the stack, and own them.
Street Fight Daily: Search Engine Jelly Relaunches, How Foursquare Predicted Chipotle’s Sales Drop
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… With Relaunch, Jelly Makes Another Run at Q&A-Style ‘Social Search’ (Search Engine Land)… How Foursquare Knew Before Almost Anyone How Bad Things Were for Chipotle (Washington Post)… Google Is Reportedly Building an All-in-One Travel App Called Trips (The Next Web)…
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