News and Analysis

Cousins Subs Leverages Social, Marketing Tech to Stay Local

Look at the menu board at Cousins Subs, and you’ll immediately notice how important local is to the restaurant’s brand. But the commitment extends beyond the Wisconsin cheddar cheese featured among the Midwest chain’s list of local ingredients—it goes all the way back to how the brand chooses to represent itself on social channels.

Street Fight Daily: Snap Wins With Programmatic AR Ads, How Cousins Subs Keeps It Local

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Snapchat’s Programmatic AR Ads Are Gaining Traction… Whole Foods Will Give Amazon Prime Customers 10% Off on Sale Items… Another Ad Tech Firm Reduces European Operations Ahead of GDPR…

Dstillery and Captivate Partner to Go Beyond Location-Based Targeting

Audience targeting is getting smarter, and reaching new customers ideal for a given brand’s campaign is getting more feasible thanks to a partnership between location-based digital video network Captivate and marketing intelligence firm Dstillery.

Commentary

Google’s Local Offerings Have Gotten Too Complicated

The extended Google+ Local rollout has been more troublesome than most. Usually when Google has experimented with social services in the past, such as Google Buzz and Google Wave, it has done so in a tangential way that does not threaten core functionality. With Google+, the gamble is to make social the center of all search activity, and yet the full realization of a social context for Google’s local search tools has yet to appear…

Daily Deals vs. Happy Hours: The Impact of Internal Marketing Promos

To get a sense of how happy hour compares to daily deals, Copilot Labs analyzed the point of sale data from a restaurant that has consistently run both happy hour and daily deals for more than a year and half. From April 2011 to October 2012 this business ran three deals and has had an active deal and happy hour every month…

Sizing the Industry: Who Gets Counted as ‘Hyperlocal?’

Since we launched Street Fight in April of last year, one question has come up again and again that we don’t have a very good answer for: “How many hyperlocal news sites are currently operating in the U.S. — and is that number growing? And if it’s growing, how fast is it growing?”

Latest Posts

5 Local Marketplaces for Childcare Services

What Taskrabbit has done for household errands, Uber has done for transportation, and ZocDoc has done for local physician services, a handful of hyperlocal vendors are aiming to now do for childcare. By harnessing the power of social recommendations and connecting parents with babysitters in their own communities, local marketplaces for childcare services are harnessing technology to facilitate online networking within physical communities…

A New Way to Think About Local: Last Mile Advertising

While advertisers today seek to take advantage of an increasingly fragmented media environment, those focused on local advertising have different challenges and opportunities in that they are in closer proximity to the point of purchase. Even with the tremendous growth of online shopping and e-commerce, two-thirds of all local purchases are still taking place in-person at brick-and-mortar locations…

Street Fight Daily: GrubHub Prices IPO, Flurry Tracks Users Offline

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyGrubHub Sets Price Range for I.P.O. (New York Times)… Flurry Launches Service to Track Mobile App Users, Offline (AdAge)… China Set to Cap Transfers Using Mobile-Payment Services (Wall Street Journal)…

With Partnerships, YP’s Consumer Product Takes a Back Seat

Last week, YP announced a deal with Yelp in which the Yellow Pages spin-off will sell Yelp’s core advertising product to the company’s small business clients. For YP, and its owner Cerberus Capital, the agreement is the culmination of a deeper strategic push and a tacit acknowledgment that its role as leading consumer brand, which defined its print past, might be waning…

5 Tools to Collect Customer Data Using Checkout Technology

Ecommerce retailers have always had a leg up on brick-and-mortar businesses when it comes to collecting data about their customers’ shopping behaviors and buying habits, but now a group of hyperlocal vendors is providing offline merchants with similar sets of tools. These vendors are using data from a merchant’s POS system to build detailed customer profiles, even in an offline environment…

Street Fight Daily: Sprint Eyes Small Business, PayPal Tracks In-Store Visits

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologySprint Turns to Digital Campaign to Make Case to Small Businesses (AdAge)…PayPal to Connect Mobile Ads to In-Store Visits (AdAge)… Does Foursquare Offer Enough to Woo Advertisers Long Term? (AdWeek)…

Probabilistic Device Matching Isn’t Perfect — But It Works

The use of probabilistic matching or statistical IDs to link multiple devices to an individual is often dismissed based on dubious accuracy. It’s true that the practice will never be 100% accurate, but even taking the conservative estimate at the lower end of this range, probabilistic matching enables marketers to scale their mobile advertising campaigns with reasonable expectations of performance…

Discovering Common Ground Among ‘Indie’ and Corporate Hyperlocal Sites

The digital Grand Canyon that has divided independent and corporate hyperlocal news sites is not looking so immense lately. The “indies” and the corporates are still kicking up a lot of dust in their community-by-community competition. But these rivals are changing their operations and strategies in ways that make them look more alike than different…

LBMA Podcast: Banjo’s Raise, Wearable Experiments, One Llama

Top stories of the week include Mahana, Locoslab, Yelp & Yahoo!, Emotient, UTEC, Apple, HP & Aurasma. The Mobile Minute with Chuck Martin recaps some highlights from SXSW and the resource of the week demystifies the second screen in North America…

Street Fight Daily: Yelp Partners With YP, Airbnb’s $10B Valuation

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyYelp, YP Partner in Local Advertising Deal (SearchEngineLand)… New Capital Could Raise Airbnb Value To $10 Billion (New York Times)… The Newsonomics of Selling Cars.com (Nieman Journalism Lab)…