News and Analysis

Facebook Expects Record-Setting FTC Fine for Privacy Violations

Share this:

Five billion would be a record for FTC punishment of a tech company and would signal harsher scrutiny to come for an industry that has accrued unparalleled wealth and power with little regulatory oversight. Facebook’s fine comes after a saga of instances in which it failed to protect user data. Most damningly, the company vowed to shore up its data protection practices in 2011 and can now be accused of failing to uphold that promise.

How Forward-Thinking Brands Are Leveraging Automation

Share this:

Global brands—the kind that can afford huge teams of in-house marketers—are increasingly relying on marketing automation tools to manage triggered email campaigns, prioritize leads for sales, and leverage mobile campaigns across their customers’ journeys.

Here is how five top global brands are deploying automation to improve the way they interact with customers.

Report: Upon Unlocking Phones, People Flock to Social, Messaging

Share this:

Anyone with a smartphone unimmune to our pervasive cultural addiction with digital communication will be unsurprised: It’s WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Facebook that currently capture most of the attention when we mindlessly unlock our mobile devices.

That’s according to media measurement company Verto Analytics, which released a report just this morning on the earliest part of the mobile journey: what happens right when we unlock our phones some 50 times per day.

Commentary

Why Hasn’t a Killer App Emerged for Finding Local Events?

Share this:

The local events space is still waiting on its ubiquitous app. There’s Yelp for restaurants. And Uber/Lyft for getting to and from. But there’s not yet a go-to for the crux of the night – the thing you do when you’re out on the town.

How Cisco’s Meraki Became the Largest Vendor of Bluetooth Beacon Gateways

Share this:

While Meraki’s routers have long had the ability to broadcast iBeacon packets, in October they released a software upgrade which enables API access to these radios, activating a major new feature. Now customers can use their Wi-Fi access points to monitor beacons from third party vendors.

Under Pressure, Local TV Advertising Still Shows Lots of Opportunity

Share this:

Local TV ad spending is set to take a big hit next year, projected to decrease at a double-digit pace after an election and Olympics year. Nonetheless, local TV represents a solid opportunity for smart media and marketing tech companies, as TV remains U.S. consumers’ primary time-sink.

Latest Posts

Closing the Loop: PlaceIQ, LiveRamp Connect TV Campaigns With Location Visits

Share this:

PlaceIQ and LiveRamp have announced the results of a new consumer behavior model that connects TV to the real world. The companies conducted a number of campaigns delivering targeted TV ads and then used location data to measure real-world store visitations, resulting in an average lift of 46 percent across three targeted verticals.

6 Tools Local Merchants Can Use to Grow Their Email Lists

Share this:

Email marketing is cheap and it’s effective, but it isn’t always easy for small businesses. For local merchants, the toughest part about email marketing can be generating a list of engaged subscribers. Here are six examples of tools that merchants can use to grow their email lists.

GrubHub’s Chia: Scale and ‘Strong Partnership Model’ Keep Company Afloat in Saturated Market

Share this:

Competition in the local delivery space has exploded in the past few years as on-demand providers rushed to connect service providers with consumers as efficiently as possible. Street Fight recently caught up with GrubHub’s SVP of Operations, Stan Chia, who says the company’s fundamental mission — restaurant discovery — hasn’t changed.

Street Fight Daily: Whole Foods Invests in Instacart, Ad Blocking Debate Gets Tempers Flaring

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Whole Foods to Invest in Instacart, Signs New Multi-Year Delivery Deal (Recode)… Fear, Loathing, and Opportunity On Display as Ad Industry Eyeballs Specter of Mobile Ad Blocking (TechCrunch)… Foursquare Won’t Be Facebook and That’s Just Fine, Crowley Says (Bloomberg)…

/Local: ‘Slashing’ the Local Web Into Tiny Nearby Slices

Share this:

“It’s 2016, and everyone is connected to the information superhighway, and yet our towns, cities and locations are largely still dark and unsearchable,” says Local Web co-founder Jess Bachman. “The Local Web is the off-ramp for the Web. The problems it will solve are as varied as the people using it. “

NearSt Founder: Shopping Locally Can Be Easier Than Ordering From Amazon

Share this:

The London-based startup wants to give brick-and-mortar stores the power to satisfy consumer needs as quickly as possible by offering them a platform to make their inventories searchable online — so users can search for and order specific items, and then get them right away.

Rocket Fuel and The Data Trust Partner to Improve GOP Ad Targeting

Share this:

Political marketers will be able to leverage Rocket Fuel’s Moment Scoring technology, which the company describes as “a real-time calculation of each ad opportunity based on the likelihood that a consumer will engage in a desired action across channels, devices, and objectives.”

Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Launches Attribution Tool, Searching on the Physical Web

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Foursquare Will Tell Businesses When Their Ads Bring You Into an Actual Store (TechCrunch)… With the Physical Web, You Become the Search Engine (Marketing Land)… Why Starbucks Is Overhauling Its Loyalty Rewards Program (Fortune)…

How the Google My Business API Changes the Local Ecosystem

Share this:

The move is a good thing for business owners but even more so for Google itself, which in providing a better means to gather data from business owners will improve the freshness and accuracy of its data.

Case Study: For Lead Generation, Cleaning Firm Prefers Emails to Website Clicks

Share this:

Despite recent successes with mobile advertising, Herminio Gomes of Sharp Cleaning estimates he currently spends just 4% of his marketing budget on digital channels. The rest is divided between direct mailers, newspaper ads, flyers, and commissions.