News and Analysis

SPB Now Stands for "Serve People Better" Street Fight

SPB Now Stands for “Serve People Better”

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Everyone loves a holiday miracle story!  And that may be the turnaround of SPB, which took over a wide range of struggling brands. The abbreviation stood for “Steak, Pizza, and Beer,” but Josh Kern, the CEO, is now committed to changing its meaning to “Serve People Better.” That’s what he aspires to do with the […]

GumGum’s Grimace: The Ads that Stole Christmas Street Fight

GumGum’s Grimace: The Ads that Stole Christmas

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Forget privacy issues. Re-targeted ads are in cahoots with the Grinch, stealing the joy of surprise from Christmas. Nobody can be blamed when opening up a gift and thinking, “Now where have I seen that before? Oh yes, ads for it were sprayed across all my social-media accounts and everywhere I went on the Web.” […]

BUST: The Party is Over for Party City Street Fight

BUST: The Party is Over for Party City

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Although we’d love to keep things festive and bright this holiday season and report just on future trends and greatest hits of 2024, the sad reality is that some retailers can’t keep the lights on.  According to CNN, Party City is the latest retailer to announce that it is closing all its stores and going […]

Commentary

Contextual and Native Come Together to Help Advertisers Win the Open Web

Contextual and Native Come Together to Help Advertisers Win the Open Web

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Both contextual and native take a natural and intuitive approach, rather than a disruptive and distracting one. If a seamless experience is the goal, context may even be a more appropriate mode for targeting native campaigns than third-party cookie targeting ever was.

ChatGPT Will Shake Up Marketing. That’s Good

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Now that ChatGPT has entered the conversation, so to speak, and AI chatbot tools are about to shake up content marketing. But don’t panic — that’s a good thing.

geotargeting

Elon Musk Doesn’t Get Geotargeting

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Elon Musk dismissed the idea that geotargeting to Jiffy Lubes customers is even possible during a recent Twitter Spaces. But leveraging store visit data for advertising is nothing new. According to Kochava CEO, Charles Manning, it’s a $10-$15 Billion market segment. Here’s how it works.

Latest Posts

Sheeva.ai and Visa To Enable In-Vehicle Payments

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Visa has joined the in-vehicle payment revolution. The brand’s heritage is in plastic credit cards, but for quite some time, it’s been a sophisticated global digital-payments platform. Its Visa Acceptance Solutions division has entered a partnership with Sheeva.ai, which enables digital payments using network tokens activated from the dashboards inside vehicles. “Network tokens are the […]

Sneak Preview: Holiday Season 2023 Retail Sales

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us.  A lot of shopping and feasting still remains.  But Street Fight wants to glimpse what retail sales have seen so far and what you might expect in the shopping and eating days until the end of 2023. What’s especially interesting is that in-person shopping seemed to take […]

The MULO Dozen: November Brands in Review

The MULO Dozen: November Brands in Review

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As we wind down 2023 and head into the holidays, here are some of the latest happenings among MULO (multi-location) brands. Because consumer sentiment and social media buzz can have a huge impact on brand reputation and sales, we’ve added a new section this month — consumer voices. If you have any news to add […]

AxleHire CEO Goes Deep into Delivery Experience

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If you think the retail industry is overwhelmed at this time of the year, when the holidays take center stage, try working in the shipping industry. Raj Ramanan is CEO of AxleHire, a last-mile shipping service for e-commerce retailers, touts its “Amazon-like” service experience of next-day and same-day delivery as desired. And satisfaction goes right […]

What Content Marketers Can Expect in 2024

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Productsup is a P2C (product-to-consumer) platform that processes the flow of content about more than two trillion items a month across upwards of 2,500 marketing and retail channels for enterprise customers around the world, including IKEA, ALDI, and Sephora. Its goal is to help companies overcome commerce complexity to deliver consistent product information and a […]

How Retailers are Keeping the Grinch from Stealing This Holiday Season

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Sadly, it’s not just the Grinch ruining the holidays for many retailers. It’s thievery. Last year, about $112B was lost to various types of retail crime, including shoplifting, flash mobs, and organized crime. Technologies, including AI-based video at point-of-sale,  sensory heat maps, cash automation technology, and autonomous security robots, are helping retailers prevent, spot, and […]

What’s Entertainment? Agency VP Nick Dan-Bergman Reveals New Research

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LaneTerralever, a full-service marketing and digital experience agency that works with a wide range of attractions and entertainment destinations (as well as the gaming industry), just completed a research report that provides insights into what today’s consumer is looking for in location-based entertainment and experiences. We don’t typically think of attractions (like amusement parks or […]

What Google At Peak Search Means for Marketers

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For Q3 2023 earnings, Google reported a shortfall on cloud revenue and that their US core advertising / search business over delivered to make up part of the difference. So how has Google become this dependent on non-advertising revenue streams to achieve future growth targets and how much longer can they go back to the […]

Keep an Eye on C-Stores (Both on and Off the Road!)

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As we’ve previously covered, the traditional C-stores (convenience store) used to be that corner deli where you could pick up snacks, soft drinks, or smokes or the stop along the highway where you gassed up, took a hygiene break and grabbed something sugary to tide you over on the road. Consumers are starting to head […]

BrightLocal Report : How Consumers Find Local Businesses

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When business owners and marketers need to ensure their business information is correct and consistent for thousands of locations, they might do well to first consult the BrightLocal Local Business Discovery and Trust Report 2023 for guidance. To Sammy Paget, Content Marketing Manager at BrightLocal, trust is at the heart of a high level of […]