News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Email Closes Path to Purchase, Ad Tech Courts Subscription-Based Publishers
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Email Lures Back E-Shoppers With Abandoned Carts… Ad Tech Vendors Are Pitching Themselves to Publishers as Subscription Saviors… Facebook Lets Advertisers Target Users Based on ‘Sensitive’ Interests…
Commentary
After Boom and Bust, How Will the Discount Economy Evolve?
The discount industry experienced 2012 as a major turning point. In the past 12 months, the deal provider landscape shook out even more, with the consolidation of many deals sites and the decline of some industry giants. Given the changed landscape, here are a few predictions about where the local offer and voucher space is heading…
Big Data and Local Search: The Netflix Precedent
We’ve entered an era when product decisions can be made not by analysis of demographics or user testing but by extremely fine-tuned measurements of current user activities. For local search, the question becomes just how many of our passive online activities can be converted into data points to be examined for purposes of marketing and product development?
Why Mom-and-Pops Will No Longer Pay for ‘Social Media Management’
The social media hype bubble has burst, and most very small businesses have not realized their ROI in social media. They’re not willing to pay my company — or anyone else — hundreds of dollars a month to market their company on Facebook or Twitter. Instead they are diverting those dollars to pay per click options, SEO, optimizing their websites for conversion and mobile, or targeted local media advertising…
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Groupon Goes After Square, Apple’s New Retail Plan
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Groupon to Replace Nearly All of Its Merchants’ Cash Registers With iPads (Recode)… Angela Ahrendts’ Plan for the Future of Apple Retail: China Emphasis, Mobile Payments, Revamped Experience (9to5 Mac)… PubMatic Acquires Mobile Ad Server Mocean Mobile (Adage)…
Study: Rampant Data Fraud Poses a Threat to the Mobile Advertising Industry
According to a new report, roughly two-thirds of the location data which mobile publishers pass on to advertising exchanges, and eventually to marketers, is inaccurate. The report, released by Thinknear, the mobile advertising wing of Telenav, found that of the 67% of mobile advertising impressions, which include a latitude-longitude data, only a third can accurately predict the location of a user down to 100 meters…
5 Ways to Track the Effectiveness of a Hyperlocal Campaign
Sixty-four percent of businesses surveyed by Oracle in 2013 said that the ability to track marketing ROI has been the most important change in the marketing world, however the majority of local merchants still aren’t sure how to compare various hyperlocal channels and measure the effectiveness of different types of campaigns. Here are five strategies for doing just that…
Street Fight Daily: Airbnb Tests Local Experiences, Patch Turns a Corner
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Airbnb Quietly Tests Selling Tours and Other ‘Experiences’ (VentureBeat)… Patch, a Network for Hyperlocal News, Turns a Corner (Boston Globe)… PubMatic, xAd Team To Launch Location-Based Programmatic Marketplace For Mobile (MediaPost)…
For Small Businesses, A Reprieve After Decades of Retreat
Earlier this week, the National Federation of Independent Business announced that its small business confidence index rose 1.8 points to 95.2 in April, the highest reading since October 2007. With small business week coming to a close, small businesses are certainly better off today than they were a decade ago…
LBMA Podcast: YP’s Mobile Labs and Second Canvas
This Week in Location Based Marketing is a weekly video podcast from the Location Based Marketing Association. Top stories of the week include Digby and Phunware, Amazon & Twitter, Uber & Google Maps, RoadID, PareUp & excess food, Selfridge’s Fragrance Lab, Rivada’s nascent mesh network, & Nivea’s SUN ads….
Street Fight Daily: Uber Seeks $10B Valuation, NextDoor CEO Charged With Felony
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Uber Said to Be in Funding Talks for More Than $10B Value (Bloomberg)… Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia Faces Hit-and-Run Charges in San Francisco (Mashable)… Foursquare’s Swarm And The Rise Of The Invisible App (TechCrunch)…
How Training Has Helped Some Community Publishers Thrive
“Getting money from local businesses is a street fight,” says Rusty Coats. “The options and alternatives seem to grow exponentially every day, and many businesses live in a fog of not knowing what to do. … That’s why I applaud these community news entrepreneurs and what they’re trying to accomplish. They are mission-driven and determined to build sustainable businesses by serving their communities.”
Report: Mobile Will Account for Half of Social Advertising Revenue by 2017
Mobile is poised to account for a majority of spending on social media advertising in the U.S. by 2017, eclipsing spending on desktop a year later, according to report from BIA/Kelsey released this morning. The research firm estimates that spending on social advertising in the U.S. will nearly triple over the next five years, swelling from $5.1 billion last year to $15 billion by 2018. In 2017, the firms expects that marketers will spend $6.7 billion — or half of all social media advertising revenues — on mobile ad formats.
Street Fight Daily: Axciom Adds Offline Data, Facebook’s Foursquare-esque Cards
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Acxiom Acquires LiveRamp to Boost Offline-to-Online Data Capability (AdAge)… Facebook is Testing Foursquare-esque Cards to Tell You More About Where You’ve Checked In (Verge)… Square’s Status? It’s Complicated (Fortune)…
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