News and Analysis
Google Faces Heat After Automated Threat to Shut Down a Cloud Client’s Project
This week’s tech giant in hot water? Google, whose abuse-prevention system apparently shut down and threatened to delete a Cloud client’s project in three days due to perceived misdoing on the client’s part.
Some of London’s Top Retailers Call for a Sales Tax on ‘Largely Online’ Rivals
Under the banner of The New West End Company, the several-hundred-strong collective of some of the U.K. capital’s top retailers is lobbying for a 1% sales tax on primarily online retailers to parallel the property-linked taxes they already pay.
Openings and New Hires at Arrivalist, Lotame, Get Five Stars
Every two weeks, Street Fight rounds up some of the latest hires and new openings in the hyperlocal marketing, tech, and media industries. This week’s roundup includes hires and openings at Yelp, Hootsuite, and dataxu.
Commentary
How a Big Agency Merger Could Benefit Local Ad Sellers
While I certainly believe that big data is our future, nuance at the local level is a part of accuracy when it comes to the providing of filters. This is an advantage that we have in local media, and we should not be shy about making that known to small and medium-sized businesses in the communities we serve.
How the GeoWeb Will Change Consumer and Business Behavior
Digital location-based technologies are now a transformative force for consumers and businesses, particularly when coupled with the rapid adoption of mobile and the growth of big data. I’m a big believer in the future for “GeoDisruption” — the potential for consumers and businesses to interact in fundamentally new ways to take advantage of increasingly precise location-based technologies…
Is Foursquare’s SMB Monetization Here for Real?
The company may discover that SMBs paradoxically prefer the simplicity of flat pricing over relatively complex (albeit more efficient) performance-based ads. The latter requires some degree of ongoing maintenance which challenges non-tech-savvy or time-starved (read: majority) SMBs. This is one reason for famously high churn for SMB self-serve advertising…
Latest Posts
6 Real-World CRM Tools for Merchants
Retailers with brick-and-mortar stores are struggling to compete with e-commerce giants like Amazon, but the fight will never be fair as long as online-only outposts have access to superior tools for managing their customer relationships and offering personalized product recommendations. Here are six real-world CRM tools that retailers are using to level the playing field…
Street Fight Daily: Amazon Guns for Square, Uber and Lyft’s Street Fight
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon Takes Shopping Offline With a New Mobile Credit Card Reader (Wired)… Accusations Fly Between Uber and Lyft (New York Times)… Yahoo Acquires ‘Pandora For Places’ App Zofari (TheNextWeb)…
ReachLocal CEO: Company Got ‘Distracted By Shiny Things’
After a turbulent twelve months, which saw two founders depart and its stock price plummet, ReachLocal appears to be working on a comeback. Sharon Rowlands, the turn-around expert who took the helm as chief executive four months ago, remains as critical as anyone, but she believes that the company is on track to get things moving in the right direction in 2015…
Services Join Products in Goodzer’s Local Marketing Platform
Goodzer has been making it easy for consumers to find products in local stores since launching in 2011. Soon the company will be doing the same with services. Last month Goodzer announced that it is adding “enhanced local services content” to its database of more than 2.5 billion products. The addition expands the company’s number of locations from 500,000 to 2.5 million…
Street Fight Daily: Square Adds Booking Service, Lyft Drives Uber Competition
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Square Continues to Diversify With Launch of Booking Service (Fortune)… Lyft Drives Uber Competition With False-Order Allegations (Bloomberg)… Online Meal Delivery Firm Foodpanda Raises $60 Million (Recode)…
It’s Official: The Newspaper Industry Has Given Up on Newspapers
In the past couple of weeks, three of the major legacy media companies announced they were splitting their companies into separate-but-unequal broadcast and print ventures. The decisions by Gannett, E.W. Scripps and Tribune to divide their once “synergistic business models” into separate and very distinct businesses indicate that we are now at the beginning of the end-of-the-end for this industry…
6 Marketing Strategies for National Retailers Managing Local Outlets
National retailers have access to expertise, money, and boatloads of data-driven marketing tools, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve got it all figured out when it comes to local marketing. One-quarter of national brands say they’re unable to track ROI at the local level, and 33.8% aren’t even investing in local marketing. Here are six strategies that national brands should consider…
Street Fight Daily: BuzzFeed Raises $50M, Senator Warns of Wearables
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… 50 Million New Reasons BuzzFeed Wants to Take Its Content Far Beyond Lists (New York Times)… Senator Warns Fitbit Is A ‘Privacy Nightmare’ And Could Be ‘Tracking’ Your Movements (Business Insider)… Apple iPhone Privacy Changes Lead to Layoffs at Retail Tracking Startup Nomi (Recode)…
How Innovation in Payments Can Drive Local Marketing
The changes in payments that Seth Priebatsch foresaw three years ago are certainly underway, but it remains more of a revolution than an evolution. Street Fight caught up with the LevelUp CEO recently to talk about why he thinks transaction data is the foundation of the next big wave of innovation in the marketing industry…
LBMA Podcast: Stores Commit to Beacons, Verizon Launches Rewards
Top stories of the week include: Instagram launches its Snapchat competitor; Medialets helps with attribution; Glympse embeds itself within Kik messenger; Nike gives away merchandise with FuelBox; and Andrew Mason emerges with Detour…
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Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem