News and Analysis
LMA Goes Small to Spread Disruptive Ideas Among Local Publishers
A recent Innovation Mission to San Francisco/Silicon Valley drew 13 senior executives in the news business (newspapers, TV, radio and research and development). It was built around three themes: audience engagement, platform strategies and using human-centered “design thinking” to solve thorny problems that bedevil most news providers.
Could Revamped Loyalty Programs Save the Retail Industry?
As retailers grapple with finding ways to reinvent the real world shopping experience, some are revisiting their loyalty programs, which have gotten stale over the years. Neiman Marcus, Macy’s, and Sephora are just a few of the well-known brands trying to create added value by offering services through their loyalty programs.
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Gowalla Founder Leaving Facebook
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Gowalla Co-Founder Josh Williams to Depart Facebook (AllThingsD)… The False Hope of Hyperlocal (Digiday)… Does In-Store Location Tracking Cross The “Creepy Line”? (MarketingLand)…
Why Local is the Future of Commerce
The past decade has seen a slow but persistent transformation in the set of services consumers use to navigate the local marketplace. One by one, technology firms have recreated or reinvented various layers of the local shopping experience, disrupting industries and opening doors for new ones to emerge. The transformation began in search, but companies have since started to rethink the way we buy and retrieve these goods and services as well as the way businesses reward, and retain, past customers, creating a coordinated “stack,” to borrow a term from computing.
Street Fight Daily: Retailers Track Shoppers In-Store, In Defense of Foursquare
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Attention, Shoppers: Store Is Tracking Your Cell (New York Times)… A (Modest) Defense of Foursquare (Inc.)… We Want Privacy From The Government, But We’re An Open Book On Social Media (Guardian)…
Leaf CEO: For POS Startups, It’s a ‘Race Against Time’
“Anyone selling software to SMBs would love it if distribution was through ecommerce or retail,” says Aron Schwarzkopf. “The problem with the industry however, is that SMBs have never reacted well to that. Remote distribution never worked. … But I do believe that five years from now the POS could be the gateway to the SMB. And that the way you will get to the small business may be through applications that work through the POS.”
Customization Failure: Why Hyperlocal Hasn’t Scaled (Yet)
Most customization that attempts to deliver hyperlocal, or even just local results, falls short. The problem is that they (and we) don’t have much more or better local content and advertising to output than we did in the days before social media and smartphones. A tool is built to operate on a national scale, but the landscape of finding the local information is messy and chaotic, lacking structured data, or consistent geographic coverage…
LBMA Podcast: Thumbvista’s Linden Skeens
In this week’s episode, Nordstrom brings Pinterest into its stores; eMart’s flying store; What3Words tries to make physical location easier with 3 words; Shopperception goes deep into buyer behavior in physical stores; WyWy signs up Vodafone for cross-screen advertising; Foursquare and Deezer partner for concert check-ins. Plus special guest Linden Skeens of Thumbvista….
Street Fight Daily: Saving Online For Offline, Tablet Owners Stay Put
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… A Big Challenge For Retail: Turning Online “Saves” Into Offline Purchases (GigaOm)… Why Bother With Wireless? Tablet Owners Stay Tethered (AllThingsD)… Unlocking The Secret To Yelp’s Global Expansion With A Stop In Istanbul (Forbes)…
Do ‘Walk-Through’ Ads Have the Zip That’s Missing in Hyperlocal Publishing?
The new “AdSweeps” are being offered by U.K. ad exchange Addiply transform 2D photographs into the 3D-like experiences shown in the above examples. The aim is not to objectify users as statistical constructs of demographic or psychographic data points, but to appeal to the universal sense of curiosity…
Local Media Companies Need to Evolve — And Do It Fast
Local media’s traditional big-man-on-campus chest-thumping doesn’t mean the same thing in digital that it does in the analog world. In fact, it’s downright laughable. So what do we do when we hit the wall, when we regularly miss revenue targets, when long term projections keep slipping more and more? So what do we do when we keep hiring more ad reps, only to discover that our revenue-per-rep begins to fall, when the evidence is undeniable that we’ve hit that wall? Here are five recommendations.
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
The Road Ahead: What Autonomous Cars Teach Us About Marketing Automation