News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: AT&T Buys AppNexus, Programmatic Recovering Post-GDPR
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… AT&T Is Buying Ad Platform AppNexus, Reportedly for $1.6 Billion or More… A Month After GDPR Took Effect, Programmatic Ad Spend Is Starting to Recover… App Publishers Must Avoid the Audience Circulation Trap..
Commentary
What Local Publishers Can Learn From Starbucks
Publishers shouldn’t think about “what thing” they should do to make money, but rather “what experience am I delivering and how can I extend that experience thoughtfully?” If something adds value for readers, adds value for advertisers, and strengthens your other efforts then you should be doing it today…
How Online Review Sites Can Regain Consumers’ Trust
As long as there are economic incentives to create bogus reviews, unscrupulous people and businesses will continue to exploit the platforms that make it easy to deceive. For the local players seeking to help users in selecting a great business, use the offline world as a guide. Require an identity, build communities of real people sharing advice, and give legitimate customers a megaphone to honestly rate the service received…
Is Groupon’s Deal Marketplace Undermining Merchants?
It has been my understanding that the purpose of daily deals is purely customer acquisition — to bring in new customers, not to target your existing ones. With the new marketplace focus, however, it seems as though this is no longer the case. I recently did a search for some of Groupon’s top NYC marketplace offers and I found that the company seems to be cannibalizing the local businesses’ existing customers by using Google AdWords to bid on nearly every Marketplace deal’s local business name…
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Facebook’s Hyperlocal Ads, Yext Hires for IPO
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…… Facebook Launches Hyper-Local Ads Targeted To People Within A Mile Of A Business (TechCrunch)… With This Hire, Yext Seems Poised for IPO (New York Business Journal)… San Francisco Legalizes Airbnb (Recode)…
Beacons Do Pose a Privacy Threat — But It’s Not the One You’re Worried About
Earlier this week, Buzzfeed published a scathing report detailing an initiative by outdoor advertising giant Titan to install bluetooth beacons in hundreds of phone booths across New York City. But the report does more to underscore the shortcomings of the local technology industry in explaining the new technology than to expose a new, meaningful threat to the consumer privacy…
Former Apple Geo Exec Launches Curbside, An App for In-Store Pickup
Curbside, a new company founded by the former head of Apple’s geo team, Jaron Waldman, launched a mobile commerce app yesterday in San Francisco that allows users to find products that are in stock at multiple stores in their area, purchase them with their mobile device and then pick them up at the location without ever getting out of their car…
Street Fight Daily: Video Spending Thrives, Uber Hires Former Lyft COO
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…… Video Growth Drives Display Advertising Spending To $37.6 Billion In 2019 (Forrester)… Uber Hires Former Lyft COO VanderZanden to Spur International Growth (Recode)… Will Apple’s “Location Warnings” Be Educational Or Scary? (MarketingLand)…
Why a Former Current TV Exec Believes in the Economics of Local Video
Street Fight recently caught up with Mark Goldman, the former COO of Current TV and current chief of online video platform ExtendTV, to talk about missed opportunities with Current, why he believes digital will not kill television (completely), and where he sees the local video market heading in the next few years…
Street Fight Daily: Square Raises $150M, New York’s Secret Beacons
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…… Square Raises $150 Million at a $6 Billion Valuation (New York Times)… Hundreds Of Devices Hidden Inside New York City Phone Booths (BuzzFeed)… Marriott Settles FCC Complaint About Blocking Rival Wi-Fi Networks (Recode)…
Why Entrepreneurial Publishing is Catching Fire in Local Digital
Traditional journalistic publishing models are collapsing right before our eyes as entrepreneurs — often with no standard journalistic background — are starting highly innovative and financially promising community news websites in many metro markets. In this Q & A, the University of Florida’s Randy Bennett explains how and why this new model of publishing is starting to replace the old models exemplified by the corporate businesses of “legacy” newspapers and broadcasters…
Should Local Advertising be Bracing Itself for On-Demand?
For the local advertising industry, which is still withstanding ripples with its shift from print to digital, why not look ahead to on-demand? Just because expectations among SMB owners have been conditioned towards moderate turnaround doesn’t mean an SMB wouldn’t be absolutely thrilled to have their newly purchased website and SEM package running tomorrow instead of next month…
Street Fight Daily: Groupon Goes After Groceries, Google’s ‘Physical Web’
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…… With New App, Groupon Goes After Grocery Deals (New York Times)… Google Reveals ‘The Physical Web,’ A Project To Make Internet Of Things Interaction App-Less (TechCrunch)… Here’s The Evidence That Google’s Search Results Are Horribly Biased (Business Insider)…
The Road Ahead: What Autonomous Cars Teach Us About Marketing Automation