News and Analysis

Why Mobile Ads Need Form and Function (VIDEO)

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Verve VP and creative director Walt Geer believes that effective mobile local advertising balances form and function. The view towards proper balance stems from Geer’s longstanding position that more attention needs to be paid to creative in mobile ad campaigns.

Street Fight Daily: Duopoly’s Dominance Grows, Aging Millenials Shape Brand Success

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Study: The Duopoly Will Capture Almost All Ad Growth in 2018… Emerging Brands Riding the Millenial Wave… Video Will Make Up 75% of Mobile Traffic in 5 Years…

Raise Report: Pixvana, Affinio, ADAY Lock Down New Funding

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Every two weeks, we round up some of the biggest fundraises taking place in hyperlocal marketing, commerce, and tech. This week’s edition includes funding for Thrive Global, Buildup, PacketZoom, and Playment.

Latest Posts

Swipely Raises $12M to Expand Push Into SMB Payment Analytics

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The payments space is starting to settle down. The flow of seed funding has slowed, and a handful companies have separated from the pack, raising meaningful capital over the past year. Add Providence-based Swipely to that list. The payments processing and analytics play has raised $12 million in new funding in a series B round led by Shasta Ventures…

Waze Builds Out Traffic Maps to Add Context in Location

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Andy Ellwood, the company’s senior director of business development, will be appearing on a panel at Street Fight Summit West in a couple of weeks in San Francisco to talk about how the future of mapping tech plays into hyperlocal marketing. Street Fight caught up with him recently to talk about how Waze makes money, the vitality of context, and fighting off Google…

5 Tips For Optimizing Hyperlocal Sites For Tablets

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The real question for hyperlocal publishers isn’t how important tablet readers are, but how best to cater to this group. The publishing standards that work on PC browsers don’t always translate to tablet screens. Here are five strategies that hyperlocal publishers should consider when creating content for readers on tablet devices…

Street Fight Daily: Seamless GrubHub Merge, Wanderful Media Raises $9M

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.GrubHub, Seamless, and the Importance of the Purchase (Bloomberg Businessweek)… Newspaper Companies Invest Another $9M In Local Deal Startup Wanderful Media (TechCrunch)… What Patch Employees Were Told During the Friday Evening Conference Call (Romenesko)…

VP Ghaffary: Yelp Is the ‘Local Layer’ of the Internet

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Mike Ghaffary, a grad school friend of CEO Jeremy Stoppelman who helped to write one of Yelp’s first advertiser contracts, now serves as the company’s vice president of business development (and will give a keynote address at Street Fight Summit West in San Francisco next month). Street Fight caught up with Ghaffary recently to discuss the relationship between content and data in local discovery, and why competitors will have a hard time “killing Yelp.”

5 Tools Brands Can Use to Create Socially Targeted Ads

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In a single day, a tech-savvy twenty-something might tweet about a yoga class, check-in at Target, ask friends on Facebook to recommend a local cafe, and post photos on Instagram from inside Whole Foods. Individually, these social media updates might not mean much. But collectively, they can be a useful tool for advertisers trying to get a deeper look inside the minds of their local customers. Here are five tools that merchants can use to create socially targeted ads…

In Push to Profitability, Patch Trims Staff and Promotes Kalin to CEO

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AOL’s Patch network of community news sites made significant staff cuts on Friday among its regional news teams and promoted Steven Kalin to CEO, in what looks to be its biggest move yet toward reaching its long-promised goal of profitability by the end of 2013…

Street Fight Daily: Google Offers Head to Google+, GrubHub and Seamless Merger Rumors

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.Google Offers Heading to Google+ (PCMag)… Grubless? Online Takeout Giants GrubHub And Seamless In Talks To Merge (TechCrunch)… LivingSocial Relying on Events to Make Up for Weaker Daily Deals Business (Washington Post)…

Moving Upstream, PayPal and Square Make a Play for the Local Merchant’s POS

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There’s a not-too-quiet rivalry brewing between Square and PayPal over offline payments, and this week saw the unofficial opening of an important new theatre: the SMB point of sale (POS). It’s perhaps the stickiest problem for both companies to solve in order to make payments work, and their respective announcements demonstrate a strategic skism similar to what we’ve seen in desktop computers and mobile phones..

5 Ways Brands Can Leverage Place-Based Mobile Targeting

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The ability to target consumers based on location is no longer an emerging element of mobile technology — it is the standard on which all other strategies are based. The growing demand for this type of mobile advertising has brought on the development of new and effective location targeting strategies, the most popular being place-based mobile ad targeting. Want in? Here are five place-based mobile targeting strategies to try.