News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: YouTube’s Brand Safety Woes Continue, Amazon’s Biggest Challenge
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Exclusive: YouTube Ran Ads from Hundreds of Brands on Extremist Channels… What Amazon’s Prime Numbers Don’t Show: The Battle to Grow in the U.S… ANA Urges Lawmakers to Hold Off on New Privacy Laws….
Commentary
Getting ‘Real-Time’ Into Hyperlocal Advertising
We’ve seen a demand to not only bring local advertisers back into the mix on mobile and online advertising, but a need to provide more relevant and more timely information within those ads. This is because consumers crave “new” at a pace never possible before now – and this desire shows in the response rates measured in multiples of a standard static banner ad…
True Innovation in Local News Organizations Still Lacking
News sites need to innovate around their core competencies by spending time understanding their customers (advertisers and consumers) and what problems they can solve for them. The solutions should be a good fit for the organization and should be something that they are uniquely positioned in the marketplace to provide…
How Siri Works and Why It Matters for Local
It’s pretty clear that Siri’s interpreter can examine a spoken query for syntax and keywords in order to trigger what it thinks is the most relevant web service. Often when Siri gets it wrong, this is because it has made a mistake about which service to call. In my experience, Siri is somewhat over-eager to assume you want local businesses when you say a word that sounds like a product or service category…
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Mobile Search Explodes, Facebook Ends the Free Ride
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… In 2013 Mobile Search Exploded but the Dollars Haven’t Followed Suit (Yet) (Pando)… Facebook Is Ending the Free Ride (ValleyWag)… Foursquare CEO: Google and Yelp are ‘Incredibly Broken’ (VentureBeat)…
Is Facebook Paper the Wake-up Call Publishers Need?
Media companies and publishers need to take a page from Facebook and other fast-moving digital properties. These digital entities are giving readers what they want while using what they know about users to “make a killing” with ads. Publishers who were virtually sidelined by these digital powerhouse companies can now get back in the game by adopting a Zuckerberg move: creating the right conditions and culture…
A ‘Connected’ Closet? As if — or Maybe Not
DigitasLBi Labs, the agency’s tech incubator in Paris, has built an in-store shopping assistant that uses image recognition software and Bluetooth low-energy beacons to match, recommend, and display possible additions to a shopper’s wardrobe. The group developed the “inspiration corridor” in conjunction with Klépierre, a french real estate company that operates malls across the country, and has installed the prototype in a Parisian shopping center…
7 Strategies for Leveraging In-Store Beacons
Indoor beacons are bridging the gap between physical locations and digital experiences, and allowing developers and businesses to interact with consumers based on their proximity to specific locations. But as with any new technology, indoor beacons do have their limitations and marketers need to be strategic in order to get the best use out of them…
Street Fight Daily: Airbnb’s Grand Plans, Foursquare’s Recommended Future
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Inside Airbnb’s Grand Hotel Plans (Fast Comapny)… Foursquare CEO: How We’ll Tell You Where To Eat And What To Order (ReadWrite)… Matt Cutts: Google Mobile Queries May Surpass PC Search This Year (SearchEngineLand)…
How Data is Transforming the Local Purchase Funnel
For years, the local marketplace largely missed out on a data revolution that has transformed commerce on the web. But the rapid adoption of the smartphone is quickly bringing the local shopping experience to parity with ecommerce, transforming the consumer journey and dramatically improving the targeting capabilities available to marketers today…
Why Booker Wants to Blur the Line Between Marketing and Operations
Last year, Bain Capital poured $27 million into Booker, a company that builds scheduling and business management software for small and medium-sized salons. Today, the New York-based startup is working to push deeper into the front office, building a new suite of tools that use a business’s operational data — booking data, payment information and the like — to engage with existing customers, and in some cases, find new ones…
Phone Leads for Local Businesses: The Unsexy Cousin of the Click (Part II)
Beyond bringing in big leads — and SMBs paying handsomely for them — call monetization will be compelled by something else: Opportunity cost. We forecast call volume to SMBs to explode (65 billion by 2016) as a result of increasing mobile usage trends. That’s going to mean a whole lot of calls to answer…
Beyond Search: AI Visibility the New Growth Lever for MULO Brands