News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Amazon to Collaborate With CPGs on Alexa Ads, Snap Yields Results for NBC News

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon Discussing Alexa Ads for 2018 with P&G, Clorox, and Others… NBC News Got 4 Million Subscribers in 5 Months to Its Snapchat Show… Location of Things Market Growing to $71 Billion…

Will 2018 Be a Tipping Point for Voice?

“There may only be 6-7 ‘commands’ that we use regularly with voice, though I’m willing to bet that as people get more and more accustomed to the interface, the horizon of possibilities expands,” David Mihm tells Mike Blumenthal in their biweekly column.

Street Fight Daily: Local Online Pubs Shirk Display, SMBs Key to Growth of Digital Ad Platforms

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Local Digital News Publishers Are Ignoring Display Revenue… IAB: Big Digital Ad Platforms Must Mine SMB Market to Keep Growing… Hearst Scored Record Profits for 7th Consecutive Year by Investing in Data…

Latest Posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

LBMA PODCAST: Square, BlockAvenue, and PlaceIQ CEO Duncan McCall

In this week’s episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan talk about rumors that Facebook is looking to purchase Waze for $1 billion. Meanwhile, Square is set to check in to Foursquare’s neighborhood; BlockAvenue launches to give your city a grade; and Unilever goes hyperlocal with its rewards program. Plus special guest Duncan McCall, CEO of PlaceIQ.

Street Fight Daily: Mason Moves On, Aruba Buys In-Door GPS Firm Meridian

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.Ex-Groupon CEO Mason Moving to San Francisco to Start New Company (Reuters)… Aruba Buys Meridian Apps, Eyes ‘Indoor GPS’ Services (ZDNet)… How Google Made Maps Human, Savvy, and Monetizable (Fast Company)…

Looking Up: Local Data and the Real World

Google Glass may be overpriced or simply too odd for many consumers, but it still represents a manner of thinking about the interconnectedness of the internet and the world that is an inevitable outcome of current trends. With smartphones as our constant companions, we already spend a vast amount of our time looking down to look things up.