News and Analysis

Three Candles to Light in Dark Times for Local News and Journalists

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The news about local news hasn’t been good lately. But there have been three recent positive signals helping to balance the scales in the form of a digital newsgathering tool, a new survey about trust, and the survival of an important hyperlocal network in Brooklyn.

Street Fight Daily: Brands Bet on Dynamic Ads, Inside Uber’s Espionage Operation

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Brands Bet on Smarter Ads… The Tricks and Travails of Uber’s Spies… After Folding in Print, Self Finds Audience of Over 8 Million on Snapchat…

How Major Brands Are ‘Gamifying’ the Consumer Buying Experience

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Although gamification itself is not a new marketing strategy, advancements in mobile apps and location technologies are providing brands with new opportunities to engage customers using these time-tested techniques. Here’s how six major brands are using gamification to change the consumer experience and promote loyalty.

Latest Posts

Brands Hope to Use Mobile to ‘Conquer’ Competitors’ Locations

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Mobile-local ad network xAd has released a new report that shows a substantive increase in interest from brands in so-called “geo-conquesting,” the technique of targeting messaging to users at or near a competitor’s location. During the second quarter, nearly one third of every lat-long targeted campaign run on the network included some form of geo-conquesting strategy…

Street Fight Daily: Millennial Media Buys Jumptap, Gannett Merges Agency Business

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyMillennial Media Snaps Up Jumptap For $193 Million (AdExchanger)… Gannett Dives Deeper Into Agency Business With ‘G/O Digital’ (AdAge)… To Square Up To Foursquare, Yelp Now Lets Users Post Reviews Directly From Its Mobile App (TechCrunch)…

Why Intuition Fails Us in Mobile Advertising

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When mobile was in its infancy, it was appropriate to use intuition and past experience as a guide for how to run mobile ad campaigns. However, the time has come for us as an industry to evolve and begin to use data and empirical evidence to guide our mobile advertising. We need to test and validate our intuitions with unique mobile data to optimize campaign performance…

5 Tools Businesses Can Use for Predictive Analytics

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Consumers are creatures of habit, and the behaviors they demonstrate today will oftentimes indicate the actions they’ll take tomorrow. A number of hyperlocal vendors are helping businesses create customer profiles based on in-store activities, purchase histories, and demographics. Now, predictive analytics tools are finally putting these customer profiles to use…

Street Fight Daily: Facebook Partners With OpenTable, Groupon Acquires Plumfare

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyFacebook To Offer OpenTable Restaurant Bookings Via Mobile (Reuters)… Plumfare Acquired By Groupon (VentureBeat)… How Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley Lost The Narrative To Yelp’s Keith Rabois (Fast Company)…

Keeping Customers Coming Back Through the Power of Data

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Gone are the days where the only record of a visit to a local business was a credit card transaction, loyalty punch, or cash receipt. Now our activities become user profiles that help real-world businesses to track us — as much to retain their customers as to make that customer experience better suited to the individual and less frustrating…

7 Key Lessons From AOL’s Struggles With Patch

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Why did a well-heeled usurper to newspapers find itself imploding last week? Ultimately, Patch could still reinvent itself — but if it does not there are plenty of lessons to be learned and applied to all of us working to produce the next model of local journalism. Here are seven…

Street Fight Daily: AOL’s Armstrong Fires Patch Director, Twitter Goes ‘Offline’

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyAOL’s Armstrong Fires Patch Creative Director During Conference Call (Screenwerk)… Mobile Ads Favor Coexistence, Not Disruption (Financial Times)…

Bundling Local News With Amazon’s Shopping List

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Combining local news with shopping is the perfect entree to courting SMBs into Amazon’s affiliate program, which surprisingly accounts for 40% of Amazon’s total revenues. That replaces expensive local sales teams with affiliate support call centers. The promise to SMBs is simply inclusion in the shopping lists. Amazon with news is no longer just a purchase destination, it becomes part of daily living…

Hyperlocal Social Ads Need to Be ‘Current, Relevant, and Contextual’

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Topsy is one of a handful data analytics startups that are helping brands make sense of the deluge of data flowing through social networks. Street Fight recently caught up with Jamie de Guerre, the company’s VP of product, to talk about the intersection social media and location, and how marketers can leverage location data to make social media marketing work…