News and Analysis
Foot Traffic Analysis Shows Height of Black Friday Retail Bump
The 2017 holiday shopping season is off to a healthy start, with consumer spending on Black Friday reaching a record $5 billion. Data from ShopperTrak shows that traffic at brick-and-mortar stores decreased less than 1% from Black Friday last year, which is actually good news compared to what some analysts had been fearing.
Mobile Strategies That Retail Brands Are Using to Fuel Holiday Sales
This holiday season, retailers with physical locations are working feverishly to compete against e-commerce giants like Amazon. Technologies that capture historical, location-based data from devices have become the next great hope for these brands, even as the physical and online shopping worlds continue to merge.
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The Unique Position of Hyperlocal Publishers in a Real-Time Bidding World
RTB, by definition, is a digital advertising technology that lets marketers buy and publishers sell display ads dynamically, in real time, on an impression-by-impression basis. In this rapidly evolving world, publishers become relegated to a supply of cookies for marketers to target versus an audience targetable through the association of the publisher’s content and audience profiles. Here’s what’s needed for local publishers to unlock more ad inventory value in this environment…
What Hyperlocal Marketers Can Learn From Disney’s Wearable Devices
We talk a lot in the hyperlocal industry about what the future of offline marketing and commerce will look like. Mostly it would seem to involve taking the advantages of online marketing and shopping (customization, personalization, analytics, actionable CRM data, etc.) and bringing them into the real world of retail stores. Different players have been experimenting with different elements of this online-to-offline migration of technology, but the Walt Disney Company has really taken the ball and run with it…
Openings & New Hires at Amazon, AOL, WebMD, Edmunds, Swipely and more…
Ray King is an extremely clever and creative visionary in the space and as a graduate of M.I.T. majoring in computer science and later becoming the CEO of Snapnames. He is a perfectionist. His new company Top Level Design, seeks to capitalize on new “top-level” domains awaiting approval. Read about more hyperlocal execs on the move in this week’s Movers & Shakers column…
LBMA PODCAST: Tempo Founder Discusses Calendars as an OS
Welcome to This Week in Location Based Marketing. In this week’s episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan talk about Nike’s use of 3D holographs to sell shoes in Amsterdam; paying by sound in Beijing; K-Mart uses check-ins to promote the world’s largest bake sale. And special guest Raj Singh, founder of Tempo talks about the calendar as the operating system.
Street Fight Daily: Twitter Tests Local Discovery, Bing Aggregates Deals (Again)
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Twitter Testing New Local Discovery Features — And It’s About Time (AllThingsD)… Microsoft Quietly Shuts Down Bing Deals, Launches Bing Offers As A Replacement (TechCrunch)… Belly Dance: Can Lightbank and Chicago’s Hot New Company Avoid Groupon’s Missteps? (PandoDaily)…
Do Community News Sites Really Need to Become ‘Digital Agencies’?
For answers, I went to Julie Brooks, CEO of eCape.com, who went into and then out of, an ambitious program of agency-like marketing services; Mike Orren, president of the new marketing service firm Speakeasy, which he co-founded with the Dallas Morning News; and Carll Tucker, CEO of Daily Voice, who is considering expansion of marketing services it offers.
Case Study: California Fitness Studio Drives Referrals With Digital Program
Ninety-two percent of consumers trust “earned media” — like word-of-mouth referrals — above other forms of paid advertising. At b2be Sports & Wellness, a high-end fitness studio in Chula Vista, California, Emmanuel Corona is looking to capitalize on this trend, partnering with Perkville to reward customers for referring their friends…
Local Search for Events: The Great Missed Opportunity
My jumping off point for this week’s column is a recent post from Greg Sterling, where he observes that despite all the impressive innovation around local search in recent years, no one has launched a truly useful local events service. I have had this feeling for years and wasn’t sure if it was just me. But if Greg doesn’t know about a local events service that truly works, I think it’s fair to say one doesn’t exist. So pay attention, developers and entrepreneurs: local events need a killer app…
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