News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Facebook Expected to Bring Bidding to In-App Ads, Barriers to Online-Offline Attribution
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Offers Brands In-App Ads… Performance Pricing Pitfalls: The Truth About Offline-Visit Data for Advertisers… TGI Friday’s AI-Powered Marketing Drives $150 Million…
Street Fight Daily: Local Merchants Unfazed by Facebook Controversy, Consumers Apprehensive on Voice
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Most Local Merchants Unfazed by Facebook Controversies, Though Some Signs of Trouble… Report: Brands Abandoning Social Media Measurement… Microsoft’s GitHub Deal Marks Latest Shift from Windows…
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
Using In-Store Analytics To Counter the Threat from Disruptive Digital Retailers
Online retailers have successfully proven that leveraging analytics drives conversions and improves shopper experience. Indoor analytics provides these same invaluable insights to physical stores, closing the data gap between digital and brick-and-mortar environments…
Case Study: Golf Club Brings Back Deal Buyers With Rewards Program
In her role as manager at Southern Pines Golf Club, Elaine Millar is responsible for the digital marketing strategy for the 18-hole course. Millar uses her rewards program as a promotional tool to keep the customers she gains through local deal sites coming back for future visits after their promotions have been redeemed…
Street Fight Daily: Square’s Alleged Saboteur, Google Buys Website Builder
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Sequoia’s $12B Man Says Someone With ‘Axe to Grind’ is After Square (Upstart)… Google Gobbles Up Restaurant Startup (Wall Street Journal)… Uber Launches uberFAMILY, a Pilot Service in NYC That Uses Cars With Child Seats (TheNextWeb)…
What’s in a Swarm? Making Sense of Foursquare’s Split
It’s hard to envision now, but it could be that a decoupled discovery and recommendation service will be just what Foursquare needs to scale its dataset beyond entertainment and to encourage users to improve the quality and accuracy of venue information. These developments would turn Foursquare into a viable competitor to data aggregators like Infogroup and possibly to Google Maps itself…
Street Fight Daily: Google Maps Adds Uber, Square Expands Partnerships
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Maps On Mobile Gets Uber Integration And More (TechCrunch)… Square Partners With Inventory Tracking Service Stitch Labs (Fortune)… New Google Now Feature Aims at Amazon (Wall Street Journal)…
At Groupon, Mobile Doesn’t Mean Local (Yet)
For the first time last quarter the majority of the company’s transactions came from a mobile device. And yet, the company also hit another, less celebrated, milestone: its local business accounted for less than half of its total billings…
Two Years After Private Equity Carve-Out, What’s Next for YP?
Two years ago, AT&T shed its local marketing business, selling a majority stake in its print and digital yellow pages assets to Cerberus Capital for $950 million in cash and debt. During a conversation with Street Fight, the company’s CEO David Krantz said the company is well-ahead of where its private equity parent expected it would be, and discussed how YP planned reprise its role as a leading consumer brand…
Finding the Right Point of Contact At: A Retail Chain
For hyperlocal vendors grappling with expansion, a national retail chain can represent the big whale. With the potential to have their platforms adopted at hundreds of locations throughout the country with just single sale, it’s no wonder hyperlocal startups are willing to devote so many resources to developing partnerships with big-name clients. Here are five strategies for finding the right person to pitch at a retail chain…
How CardStar’s Contextual Mobile Experience Increases Ad Engagement
Ad units that work on the web do not work on mobile. Powered by Skyhook Wireless’s Context Accelerator SDK, CardStar launched a new interface that intuitively populates users’ loyalty cards, key tags and deal content based on their proximity to nearby geofenced venues. It resulted in a 2x lift in average session length, 57% growth in daily users and 79% growth in sessions per day…
















































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