News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Google Helps Brands Close Path to Purchase, Placed Expands to TV
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Gives Brands Ads, Data to Compete on Price, Local Inventory… Facebook Will Ban Sellers of Shoddy Products… How Viacom Uses AI to Predict the Success of Its Social Campaigns…
Street Fight Daily: Google Expands Into Fresh Food Marketing, Snap Expands Commerce for Brands
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Enters Deal with Carrefour to Sell Food Online in France… Snap Expands Commerce for Brands Within Stories… Report: Social Attracting Most Widespread Investment from Advertisers, Topping Search…
Commentary
Why Broadcasters Need to Embrace Digital Hyperlocal
There are lots of hyperlocal marketing opportunities are being missed daily by traditional broadcast media. This isn’t because stations don’t want the revenue — it’s because they are so understaffed and under-funded, it’s simply difficult to devote resources to learning new technologies. But this may be exactly the right time to start investing their (very small) resources to upgrade mobile apps and improve online capabilities to tap hyperlocal dollars…
What Reviews Sites Need to Do to Prepare for Facebook’s Graph Search
It’s well known that reviews, ratings, and recommendations are a major factor in driving consumer decisions. Sourcing friends or people you know to provide advice holds even more weight when it comes to personalization and has an added benefit of trust. This is what makes the concept of Facebook’s new Graph Search so powerful…
Efficiently Selling to SMBs: Finding Paths of Less Resistance
We’re entering a more fertile environment for what I’ll call the SMB advertising “Trojan Horse.” Local companies start by targeting SMBs’ CRM systems, payroll, back office management, reputation management and payment processing. From there, local advertising can be unveiled as a “one-stop-shop” upsell…
Latest Posts
Placed Raises $10M to Help Mobile Advertisers Ditch Clicks
A hedge fund has led a $10 million series B investment in Placed, a location analytics firm that uses Nielsen-like panels to help advertisers measure the effectiveness of advertising in the physical world. The funding highlights the growing demand by stakeholders in the mobile marketing industry to move beyond the click-through-rate by measuring the performance of digital advertising offline…
Mobile’s Increasingly Strong Influence in Consumer Purchase Decisions
The third annual installment of the xAd/Telmetrics Mobile Path-to-Purchase study shows that mobile is a powerful force throughout the consumer purchase cycle. Consumers are spending more research time on their mobile devices than on their PCs, and more than one-third of mobile users use their devices exclusively to research purchases…
Street Fight Daily: GoDaddy Files for IPO, Amex Partners With Uber
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… GoDaddy Files for IPO (Wall Street Journal)… Uber and Amex Partner on In-App Loyalty Program (Recode)… Head of PayPal to Join Facebook (New York Times)…
JiWire Rebrands as NinthDecimal to Focus on Data Business
JiWire has rebranded as NinthDecimal as it looks to compete in an increasingly crowded mobile advertising technology sector by highlighting its data business. The move underscores the importance of consumer data in the way advertisers buy audiences online, and subsequent decline of media as the currency of online advertising…
7 Analytics Tools to Track Local Campaigns
Gut feelings and instinct can only take business owners so far. To determine the actual value of local campaigns, marketers need access to raw data. Unfortunately, obtaining this information — and then using it to compare two or more hyperlocal platforms in a head-to-head setting — isn’t always as straightforward as it seems. Here are seven platforms that businesses can use to measure the effectiveness of their local campaigns…
Street Fight: Uber Raises $1.2B, Apple Acquires Local Search Engine
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Uber Gets an Uber-Valuation (Wall Street Journal)… Apple Acquires Spotsetter, A Social Search Engine For Places (TechCrunch)… Jim Brady Plans News Org in Philly Called Brother.ly (Poynter)…
Up Close and Personal: Ex-Patcher Tells How He Went Independent
Michael Dinan was senior regional editor for Patch in suburban Connecticut when he — along with hundreds of other editorial staffers — was terminated in January as part of Aol’s deal to sell most of the community news network to Hale Global. After the blow fell, he turned around and set up the independent site New Canaanite within days — and expanded it to a collaborative network in suburban Connecticut shortly thereafter…
Openings and New Hires at Dex Media, Connectivity, GoDaddy, and Hearst
Every two weeks, Search Influence’s Kelly Benish — who knows practically everyone in hyperlocal — covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. In this week’s edition, moves and new openings at hibu, Google, PlaceIQ, Advance Visibility and more …
LBMA Podcast: Chuck E. Cheese Meets Oculus Rift
Welcome to This Week in Location Based Marketing, a weekly video podcast from the Location Based Marketing Association. Top stories of the week include Metaio’s Thermal Touch, Beck’s playable poster, tipping street musicians with Bitcoin, JINS health glass — and Bubbly launches direct carrier billing…
Street Fight Daily: Pinterest Eyes Small Business, Mobile Search Shifts From Google
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Pinterest Takes on Google and Facebook With Self-Service Ads (Wall Street Journal)… Study: Mobile Search Is Shifting From Google to Mobile Apps Like Yelp (AdAge)… P&G, Pepsi Try Out Foursquare’s New App, Swarm (AdAge)…

















































AI Won’t Fix Advertising – It May Scale Its Chaotic Nature