News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: The American Version of GDPR Is Coming, Supersized Funding Rounds Becoming Common
TODAY IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING… Should Ad Tech Panic Over the California Privacy Protection Act Now or Later?… $100 Million Was Once Big Money for a Startup. Now, It’s Common… Bridg Positions Itself as Marketing Arm for Offline Businesses…
Happy Returns Expands Into College Market
Startup Happy Returns, based in Santa Monica and founded by alums from HauteLook and NordstromRack.com, offers a way for shoppers to return e-commerce purchases at real-world kiosks. Beginning this fall, Happy Returns will be setting up kiosks—which it calls “Return Bars”—at five campuses around the country to capitalize on the returns generated by back-to-college online shopping.
Street Fight Daily: Best Practices in Reputation and Review Management, Ad Tech Consolidation
TODAY IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING… Survey: Identifying Best Practices in Reputation and Review Management… As Duopoly Reigns, Ad Tech Industry Consolidates… Happy Returns Expands Into College Market…
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
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…
How Small Business Software Could Produce The Next Hundred Billion Dollar Company
A resurgent business software sector has started to use cloud computing to bring cheaper, simpler accounting, point-of-sale and even marketing software to brick-and-mortar businesses. With their advances, the era of entrepreneurship has come to the real world…
How Personalization And Security Will Coexist in Local Commerce
The evolution of mobile technology has been very exciting to observe, especially in the local commerce space. As I covered in my last piece we are finally starting to see things come to life with the ability to pay for everyday products and services using mobile devices. But overall one has to ask if this […]
Street Fight Daily: New York’s Ad Network, Adobe Bets on Location
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Ads Will Fund New York City’s Plan For World’s Fastest Municipal Wi-Fi Network (AdAge)… Adobe All-In with Location-Based Marketing (CIO Today)… Restaurant Discovery Service Zomato Raises Further $60M (TechCrunch)…
Target Flips the Switch on New In-Store Navigation Features
“We want to build mobile experiences that Target guests will love,” Alan Wizemann, VP of product and mobile for Target.com told Street Fight. “We believe the new shopping lists and maps make it easier than ever to shop Target. … We’ve got a lot more mobile innovation to come…”
Why Brand Names Matter Less and Less on Main Street
The “brand era” that gave rise to some of the tentpoles of the American economy may soon come to an end. The web, now reachable wherever and whenever through smartphones, can help consumers answer many of the questions that brand once answered…
Did Apple Just Transform Pay-Per-Call (Without Anyone Noticing)?
OSX Yosemite’s “Continuity” feature has received surprisingly little media attention in general and zero coverage for its implications for call monetization. But it could be a glimpse into the sector’s future.
Street Fight Daily: Uber’s Smear Tactics, Groupon Buys (Other) Swarm
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists (BuzzFeed)… Groupon Acquires In-Store Analytics And Marketing Startup Swarm Mobile (TechCrunch)… U.S. Mobile Payments Market to Boom by 2019, Research Firm Says (New York Times)…
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