News and Analysis

Customers Who Hop Onto Digital Trends Earliest Less Engaged With Advertisements

Marketers look to trendsetters as “influencers,” but can the influencer be influenced herself? A study recently published in the journal “Marketing Science” suggests that, in fact, early propagators of trends tend to respond less to advertising than latecomers.

How The Weather Company Turns Forecast Data Into Game-Changing Retailer Insights

Using live weather conditions from radar and satellites, along with road-specific forecasts, high-resolution traffic feeds, and user-reported traffic conditions, companies are harnessing weather data to inform nearly every aspect of their businesses.

Street Fight Daily: Target Aims to Lead on Customer Experience, GDPR’s Impact on Facebook

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Target Is Trying to Become America’s Easiest Place to Shop. Here’s How… GDPR Is What Facebook Advertisers Should Really Worry About… Consumers Want Voice Services Beyond Basics…

Commentary

Should All Ad Impressions on Mobile Devices Really Count as ‘Mobile?’

For mobile advertising to reach its true potential the industry needs to start looking more closely at the nature of a mobile impression and applying more scalable and accurate ways to target users. The current one-size-fits-all approach is simply not going to work as users are increasingly cutting the cord and relying entirely on their tablets or phones…

When Big Brands Go Local, They Need to Think Social

Social networks have become increasingly relevant in the local search space for consumers. Social’s impact on local search is far from limited to searches performed on local networks, though. It’s also impacting traditional search results, rankings and relevance. Here are three local-social tactics that need to be included in every national brand’s digital strategy…

Report Identifies Elements of Hyperlocal Success in the U.K.

It is to hyperlocal media’s advantage that it remains a nascent sector which is developing quickly. Unwedded to the business models of the past, hyperlocal has the scope to experiment with different models for content, revenue and community engagement. In doing this, and hyperlocal players have as much to learn from the community development sector as they do from other media outlets…

Latest Posts

Mobile Media Summit Brings Together Top Agencies, Marketers for SF Event

The second-annual Mobile Media Summit San Francisco: Apps and Ads on January 21st at the Westin Market Street will bring together the biggest names in advertising and marketing to discuss the secrets to successful app marketing, as well as the most important topics facing the mobile industry. Street Fight readers get a discount…

LBMA Podcast: Vodka-Powered Smoke Signals

On the show: Strongbow embeds RFID chips in bottle caps; Moto X gives print a dose of interactivity; Tata taps your smartphone for usage-based insurance. The app of the week is Openbay; the resource of the week deciphers why customer service is more important than advertising. Special guest is David Rush, founder of Earshot.

Street Fight Daily: How Ford Uses Location Data, Radius Raises $13 M

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.How Chrysler, Ford, GM, Others Use Auto Location Data (AdAge)… Palantir Co-Founder Chases New Data Source: Small Businesses (Wall Street Journal)… In an Economics Experiment, Uber Cuts Prices in 16 Cities (Businessweek)…

With Privacy Debate in Rear View, Euclid Looks to Make Offline Analytics Mainstream

The clamor that erupted last year after the Wall Street Journal and other mainstream outlets reported that some big retailers passively tracked users in their stores has waned in recent months, opening the door for an emergent offline analytics sector to become a mainstay retail industry. Euclid, the company that quickly became the poster-child for in-store tracking during the debate, is making its core tracking technology free this morning in an attempt to lure in the millions of smaller, more apprehensive retailers across the country…

Nomi Adds In-store Messaging to Offline Measurement

The New York-based startup is moving deeper into the proximity marketing business by adding in-store messaging capabilities to its existing measurement and analytics products. The proximity marketing product, Nomi Mobile, uses a Bluetooth LE beacon to enable retailers to send notifications, rewards, and other messaging to customers on their existing mobile applications as they walk through the store…

How Local Publishers Can Score With Sponsorships: One Yard at a Time

I spoke recently to the indefatigable Teresa Wippel, founder and publisher of the indie My Edmonds News north of Seattle, about her search for new revenue stream. In 2011, two years after she began her site, she turned to a sponsorship model for streamed high school football coverage to supplement her modest display revenue. The result has been a significant source of new revenue from seven local sponsors…

5 Tools to Target Customers Based on Past Purchase Behavior

By tracking a consumer’s past purchasing behavior, marketers can design highly targeted ads based on the specific preferences and tastes of individual customers. Here are five tools that marketers can use to gather information about their customers’ past purchasing habits…

Street Fight Daily: Groupon’s Next Big Thing, Yelp Ad Growth Lifts Stock

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.Groupon’s Next Big Thing? Helping Mom-and-Pop Shops Unload Extra Inventory. (Recode)… Yelp Reaches High as JPMorgan Says Ad Growth Will Lift Stock (Bloomberg)… Will (Local) Q&A App Jelly Succeed Where Others Have Failed? (Screenwerk)…

Esri’s Amber Case: Why ‘Less Is More’ With Local Data

As far as technologists are concerned, few in the industry are more familiar with the nuts and bolts of how location data is made than Amber Case. A self-proclaimed “cyborg anthropologist,” she sold her startup Geoloqi, which built positioning algorithms for developers, to Esri last year, and today, she heads up the 45-year-old mapping firm’s R&D center. Street Fight recently caught up with Case to discuss what we might expect from location data in the years to come…

Hyperlocal M&A in 2014 — Here’s What the Big Acquirers Are Looking For

YP’s acquisition of Sense Networks earlier this week comes as M&A activity in the local technology continues to increase, with the market seeing the number of large, double digit deals increase in 2013. Here’s a quick look at several major players who may currently be in the hunt for locally focused acquisitions and what they might be looking for.