News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Google and Target Partner on Voice; Amazon’s Future in Search Ads
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google and Target Offer the First Voice-Activated Coupon on Google Assistant… Amazon Could Dominate Product Search Ads by 2020… LA Times: ‘Programmatic Is Going to Be a Big Part’ of Publisher’s Future..
Commentary
Waze Highlights Inconsistencies in Local Data
There are too many different ways to categorize businesses, and none of them represents a unified standard for online search. Such a standard if widely implemented would make all businesses categorized as grocery stores line up neatly with each other and would provide a significant boost in overall relevancy…
Hyperlocal Online Ads Are About to Get a Lot Bigger — Billboard-Sized
The next time you are in your doctor’s office, at the mall or at the local sports arena, the ad that you see on a plasma TV display or a digital kiosk could have been purchased and placed there using the same type of system advertisers are using today to buy and place online display ads…
What Can Online Directories Learn From the Yellow Pages?
I’m not advocating a return to the phone book, but I am curious about the lesson it might have to teach us. In particular, the notion of restricted and curated data sets may be worth a revisit. Without foregoing the benefits of scalability, search sites could do more to enable the curation of local data by business owners and other members of local communities…
Latest Posts
Can Renewed Coordination Prevent a Rollup in Local Media?
Last week Google made news when the search giant struck a deal with the Local Media Consortium to power a private advertising exchange . Yesterday, Christian Hendricks, the Consortium’s chairman and a McClatchy executive, pitched the plan to a room of media executives, and made the case why the new consortium could succeed where it failed nearly a decade ago…
Street Fight Daily: RadioShack Shutters Stores, A Rollup in Food Delivery
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… RadioShack Plans to Close Up to 1,100 Stores (Wall Street Journal)… With Eye On Growth, Just Eat Buys Meal2Go To Offer EPOS Tech To Its Takeaway Partners (TechCrunch)… NCR Updates Its iPad Cash Register With Loyalty Features (GigaOm)…
6 Call Monetization Platforms for SMBs
Phone leads may not be glamorous or trendy, but they’re the backbone of local marketing strategy for millions of small businesses in the professional services, travel, auto, and insurance industries. $68 billion is spent annually on localized ads to generate these calls. Here are six call monetization vendors that businesses can work with…
Street Fight Daily: Square Makes Loans, Why Microsoft Invested in Foursquare
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… With Square Capital, Square Begins Offering Controversial Merchant Cash Advances (Recode)… It’s Now Obvious Why Microsoft Invested Millions In Foursquare (Business Insider)… Uber Says it Doesn’t Discriminate by Neighborhood in Chicago (GigaOm)…
Political Spending May Stem the Tide, But Legacy Media Is Losing Its Grip
Borrell Associates predicts that political spending on marketing is set to balloon in the next four years, growing from 120 billion in 2012 to well over 950 billion in 2016. The overwhelming majority of that money will still be spent traditional media — namely, television —with only a fraction spent online…
Why In-Store Messaging Needs Offline Measurement
Offline, in-store environments historically have had limited tools for measuring impact of any marketing effectiveness, reach, or exposure. But mobile location technologies with geofence capability measure shopper behavior and produce actionable data sets, opening new opportunities to quantify messaging impact. Measurement is not only possible, but actionable…
How to Decide If Your Business Should Use Indoor Location Technology
Indoor location technology may not be the right solution for every merchant on the street. The costs and complexities of these systems can sometimes be too much for businesses in certain industries to handle, including smaller merchants who may not see enough foot traffic on a daily basis to benefit from using in-store location tools. Here are five questions that business owners should ask when weighing the decision of whether to start using indoor location technology…
Street Fight Daily: Square Reportedly Postpones IPO, Apple Brings iOS to the Car
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Square IPO Postponed Indefinitely (Fox Business)… Apple to Bring iPhone Software to Cars (Wall Street Journal)… Google ‘Map Jacking’ is Rampant, a Threat to Public Safety (Komo News)…
GrubHub Files For $100M IPO
Grubhub has officially thrown its hat into the I.P.O. ring, with the public filing of its prospectus Friday morning. The online ordering firm, which merged with competitor Seamless in August, filed the prospectus confidentially with the SEC last week under a new provision introduced by the JOBS act aimed at making the IPO process less expensive for smaller companies…
How Qualcomm Wants to Reinvent Retail
Qualcomm Retail Solutions works with retailers and other venue owners to put the company’s two positioning technologies, Gimbal and iZat, to use. Street Fight recently caught up with Kevin Hunter, senior director of product management for Qualcomm Retail Solutions, to talk about the explosion in retail technology, the emerging technology driving innovation, and what the introduction of mobile will mean for the existing retail landscape…
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