News and Analysis
Hard Data on the Choices that Make or Break Loyalty Programs
A new report from loyalty marketing firm Kobie Marketing provides cutting-edge insight on the habits and preferences of consumers vis-à-vis the loyalty programs brands are trotting out to capture customers’ attention at a time when retail giants with vast digital resources loom large. We have the highlights.
Commentary
The Shifting Line Between Free and Paid Local Marketing Services
The manipulation of organic reach on Facebook is one of many examples of the shifting boundary between free and paid local marketing services. In “pure” local search, that boundary has tended to be relatively clear: look for a local business in your typical IYP and you’ll see sponsored listings at the top of the results page, followed by organic results. But that boundary is likely more clear to those of us who know what to look for than it is to the general user…
Probabilistic Device Matching Isn’t Perfect — But It Works
The use of probabilistic matching or statistical IDs to link multiple devices to an individual is often dismissed based on dubious accuracy. It’s true that the practice will never be 100% accurate, but even taking the conservative estimate at the lower end of this range, probabilistic matching enables marketers to scale their mobile advertising campaigns with reasonable expectations of performance…
Is Facebook Paper the Wake-up Call Publishers Need?
Media companies and publishers need to take a page from Facebook and other fast-moving digital properties. These digital entities are giving readers what they want while using what they know about users to “make a killing” with ads. Publishers who were virtually sidelined by these digital powerhouse companies can now get back in the game by adopting a Zuckerberg move: creating the right conditions and culture…
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: GoDaddy Renews IPO Push, Amazon Eyes Hotels
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…GoDaddy Seeks Nearly $4.5b IPO Valuation, Talks Diversifying (New York Post)… Amazon to Get Into Hotel Booking With Launch of Travel Site (Skift)… Leaked Internal Uber Deck Reveals Staggering Revenue And Growth Metrics (Business Insider)…
Best Practices in the Cloud-Based “Local Service Layer” for National-to-Local
Thanks to evolving tech tools, national marketers are in a powerful position to harness their web of data to deepen their relationships with consumers via their local agents. Best practices set a baseline of data, create a parent-child structure, monitor performance — and iterate, iterate, iterate…
Brooklyn Site’s Loyalty Pitch Tries to Answer: ‘How Many Customers Did You Bring Me?’
A soon-to-be launched section in Bushwick Daily — called Village — will seek to build more and deeper connections between residents and merchants of Bushwick. The centerpiece of Village is an in-house loyalty program where users will get a bonus when they make their first purchase. If they become a frequent customer, they get another bonus and a Foursquare-type badge…
What Do The Internet and Your Commute Have In Common? A Lot More Than You Think.
A handful of ex-engineers from Google and a specialist from Stanford want to take their learning from playing traffic cop on the web to solve the congestion problems plaguing some of the world’s business cities. Their insights into managing congestion at Urban Engines could have valuable lessons for managing local commerce…
Street Fight Daily: Senator Probes Uber, Apple Maps Adds Partners
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…… Senator Questions Uber on Privacy Practices (New York Times)… Apple Maps Announces New Business Listings Data Partners (Mac Rumors)… Reviewers Mostly Positive, 67% on Yelp Are Either 4 or 5 Stars (Screenwerk)…
Case Study: MEDIATA Sees 20% Campaign Lift Through Skyhook Partnership
In an effort to reduce wasted spend, MEDIATA partnered with leading location network Skyhook, testing its Hyperlocal IP feature. Skyhook has differentiated itself from other IP positioning providers by taking an empirical approach to location. Rather than inferring IP address positions using network topology—a notoriously inefficient and inaccurate method used by many competing firms—Skyhook takes advantage of their global database of ground-truth locations, which have been assigned to IP addresses…
Why TV Remains the Heartbeat of Local Connection