News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Amazon and Google Announce New Initiatives Focused on SMBs

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Introduces Startup Campaigns for Small Businesses… Amazon Plans Startup SMB Delivery Services for Its Own Packages… How a Proposed California Privacy Regulation Could Impact User Data-Driven Business…

With GDPR In Place, Will Push Marketing Recede?

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Retailers love push marketing. But the practice relies on consumer data in order to work, and that’s becoming a major problem with the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation firmly in effect.

Study: Challenges Persist with One-Partner Programmatic Strategy

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84% of brands want to bring their programmatic ad spending in-house as a way to gain more control over what’s become an opaque process. The problem? A study by Visto shows that advertisers who use just one platform are losing out on opportunities to lower inventory costs and efficiently delivery on KPIs.

Commentary

Focus Turns to Attribution in Mobile Local Ad Tech

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The promise of mobile local advertising continues to invoke the “closed loop” idea. The device’s portability and location awareness means that it goes to the store with you – enabling all new ad performance tracking opportunities. Nothing terribly new there. But it seems like the tech and media worlds are finally acknowledging that 93% U.S. retail spending happens offline. And an increasing share of that — to the tune of about $1.5 trillion — is influenced online and on mobile. So connecting those dots is the name of the game…

Why Attribution Is the ‘New Black’ in Local Marketing

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Advertising performance measurement has never been a simple process, but cross-platform consumer media usage, mobile, and advanced targeting technologies have made the process of linking ad engagement to a consumer purchase action even more challenging. The next generation of proper attribution has become essential for the ad tech industry and marketers looking to make ROI-driven advertising decisions…

What Legacy Local Media Can Learn From the Red Sox

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In advance of 2013, the Red Sox again fired the team’s manager, changed the executive suite, and reinvented the workforce. The new goal: replace high-cost and complaining “superstars” with a talented new group who bought into the new model. The organization became more horizontal and the salary of the team dropped by 20%. Meanwhile, over the course of the year, productivity increased by 40%…

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Groupon Goes After Groceries, Google’s ‘Physical Web’

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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)…

How to Maintain a Rational Social Marketing Strategy in a Confusing Landscape

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Small business owners may find themselves perplexed by the variety of opportunities to engage socially with consumers. Of course, it would be premature to suggest that any SMB needs an Ello marketing strategy. But there’s an advantage to be gained in keeping your marketing strategy attuned to the groups actively pursuing interests relevant to your business…

Conference Notebook: Location Is an Obvious Asset for Trulia

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At the Mobile Marketing Association’s 2014 SM2 Conference Wednesday, marketers from some of the nation’s largest brands talked about the evolving role of location in their marketing mix and the challenges in balancing an appetite for new technologies with the needs of an existing brand…

Street Fight Daily: Gannett Buys Rest of Cars.com, Angie’s List Struggles

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Gannett Buys the Rest of Cars.com for $1.8 Billion (Businessweek)… Why Angie’s List Is In Trouble (Time)… PayPal Taps an Outsider to Push It Into a New Era (New York Times)…

After Spinoff, ReachLocal Founders Relaunch ClubLocal as Serviz

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Late last year, ReachLocal founders Michael Kline and Zorik Gordon parted ways with the company and spun off a still-nascent local commerce project, ClubLocal, that both helped develop. Today, the long-time executives have relaunched the project as Serviz, an application that builds on many of the services core functionality….

Conference Notebook: Toyota Motors Turns to Location Targeting on Mobile

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It’s Advertising Week in New York, and that means the marketers from around the world come together to talk shop, make deals, and blow off some steam. At the Mobile Marketing Association’s 2014 SM2 Conference Tuesday, marketers from some of the nation’s largest brands talked about the evolving role of location in their marketing mix…

Street Fight Daily: News Corp Buys Move.com, Angie’s List Mulls Sale

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyRupert Murdoch Wants to Sell You Your Next Home (Time)… A Report Says Angie’s List Might Sell Itself And Now Its Stock Is Surging (Business Insider)… The Real Reason PayPal Isn’t an Apple Pay Preferred Partner (BankInnovation)…

SMBs Now Spend More Than 1/4 of Marketing Budgets on Digital Media

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A new report released by Borrell Associates paints a rosy picture for the immediate future of local marketing — as long as the industry can overcome a few barriers. The report, which drew from a survey of over 2,000 small businesses, found that they now spend more than a quarter of their budgets on digital media with robust growth in the social media and mobile advertising sectors…

At GoDaddy, CEO Blake Irving Searches for a New Domain

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Irving has an ambitious plan to turn GoDaddy into a much larger, and more profitable, company. The strategy begins with the company’s 12 million domain customers and ends with a constellation of concentric services intended to serve an increasingly entrepreneurial, and distributed, global economy…

How Y Combinator Grad Estimote Plans to Turn Beacons Into a Big Business

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When Estimote graduated from Y Combinator in July of 2013, the startup was riding one of the hottest trends in tech: beacons. By the end of the year, the company had raised $3.1 million to turn its fist-sized adhesive proximity beacons into an “operating system for the physical world.”