News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Why Amazon’s Pursuing Pharmacy (and Everything Else); Programmatic Hurdles Ahead
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon’s PillPack Deal Gives It Access to Sensitive Health Data… The Programmatic Transparency Challenges That Still Must Be Solved… Google Shows Preference for Quicker-Loading Mobile Pages…
How Food Trucks Can Leverage Location Data to Optimize Sales
“Food truck owners can increase sales with more accurate projection models that leverage location data from both traditional sources, like census and point of interest datasets, [coupled] with new streams, like transactional and foot traffic data,” explains Santiago Giraldo, an urban scientist at CARTO.
Street Fight Daily: Kroger Plans on Driverless Grocery Delivery, Firms Run Afoul of GDPR
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Kroger Plans to Introduce Driverless Grocery Delivery… ‘Everyone Is Breaking the Law’: GDPR Compliance Falls Short… Programmatic Is Evolving Fast. These Five Charts Show the Changes…
Commentary
Everybody Is a Media Company, So Now What?
The explosive growth of personal media has disrupted everything it touches. The same inexpensive tools that consumers are now using are also available to any-sized businesses, which has the potential of entirely leveling the playing field in consumer goods and services by driving down the cost of marketing. The neighborhood doughnut shop can just as easily make and distribute media as the Kroger Bakery up the street or, by God, even Walmart. We may chuckle today but just wait…
How Facebook’s Rumored News Product Could Hurt Local Sites
News websites dodged a bullet when Facebook didn’t announce a rumored RSS or news-in-your-news-feed product yesterday. If Facebook actually got serious about these plans, news websites could expect an even larger portion of their site’s traffic to be directed through the social network — and their brands could be endangered…
Authenticity: The Force Behind the Local Snowball Effect
One of the new values that the Web demands is authenticity. For news, it means a commitment to truthfulness by bringing readers or viewers as close as possible to the source of information. In business, it also means being truthful in our behavior, attributions and even our intentions. It’s an underappreciated and underutilized value, and it strikes at the very heart of marketing — especially at the hyperlocal level…
Latest Posts
Three Months After IPO, Grubhub is Growing — And Profitable
Shares of the company rose 4% Thursday morning as the online ordering firm reported solid revenue growth, and a stronger-than-expected jump in profit during its first full quarter as a public company…
WPP Mobile Exec: Location Already ‘Not Special’ in Ad Tech
In a conversation this week, Michael Lieberman, chief executive North America at WPP’s Joule, discussed the copy-cat syndrome among mobile-local ad tech, how brands have ditched geo-fencing, and why influencing consumers’ impulse purchases might be the next big growth market for digital marketing dollars…
How Community Involvement Can Pay Off for Local Publishers
Commuter traffic tie-ups and convenience store holdups can’t be the heart of a community news product. “Duty” coverage is still part of many sites’ content menu, but, by itself, it can’t build a solid relationship with community. The trick is to empower users “to take action to improve their communities”…
Street Fight Daily: The ‘New’ Foursquare, Apple Eyes Mobile Wallet
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… The Next Age of Foursquare Begins Today (Verge)… Apple’s Mobile Wallet Talks Heat Up (Information)… New Google Maps for Android and iOS Takes a Jab at Foursquare (Mashable)…
Study: The Problem With Mobile Payments Isn’t Awareness — It’s Utility
A new study from Thrive Analytics shows that the sluggish growth of mobile wallet initiatives is largely a product — not a marketing — problem. Among the 32% of respondents who used a wallet app, usage was, for the most part, intermittent…
Conference Notebook: Navigating a Future For Indoor Mapping
In a world overflowing with data, it’s ironic that the last bastion of opacity — the place about which businesses know the least — is also the place where we spend the majority of our money: the physical store…
Street Fight Daily: Amazon’s New Wallet, Linkedin Buys Bizo
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Passbook Redux: Amazon Copies Apple’s Underwhelming Digital Wallet (Pando)… LinkedIn Makes Another Deal, Buying Bizo (New York Times)… For Its First Google Glass Effort, EBay Adapts Its RedLaser Product Finder App (TechCrunch)…
How SMBs Can Create Comprehensive Local Marketing Strategies
When it comes to creating marketing strategies that include two or more hyperlocal solutions, many local merchants don’t even know where to begin. Here are five strategies that SMBs should consider…
Street Fight Daily: Yahoo Buys Flurry, Urban Compass Raises $40M
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Yahoo Acquires Flurry to Bolster Mobile Offerings (New York Times)… Urban Compass Raises Money at $360 Million Valuation (Bloomberg)… Airbnb Drops Homejoy From Cleaning Trial, Handybook Remains On In Three Test Markets (TechCrunch)…
Yelp, Foursquare, and the Downsides of Mobile-First
In an era where the “mobile-first” motto borders on dogma for tech companies, the virtues of the desktop internet often are overlooked. While Yelp continues to benefit from desktop search, mobile-first Foursquare has struggled to sustain the explosive growth it saw early on — partly because its influence on the web ecosystem remains relatively weak…
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AI Won’t Fix Advertising – It May Scale Its Chaotic Nature