News and Analysis

Tech and Brand Partnerships Point to a New Future of Mobile Shopping

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In the future, partnerships between brands, tech companies, and marketers will enable a massive shift in payments and change how shoppers access the goods they want. So said Mike Jaconi, CEO and co-founder Button, maintaining that U.S. commerce is not yet primed for purchase — but it’s getting there.

Street Fight Daily: Facebook Wants Brands on Messenger, Adobe Courts Retailers

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Is Adding More Advertising Objectives for Brands Using Messenger… Adobe Wants to Make Every Online Retailer More Analytical… Publishers Want More Data, Monetization Options from Facebook, Google, and Apple…

Street Fight Daily: Walmart Tests Grocery Delivery, YouTube Rolls Out Marketing Tool

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Walmart Partners with Deliv to Test Grocery Delivery Direct to Fridge… YouTube Uses Data to Create Thousands of Ads from Assets in One Video Campaign… Why Brands Continue to Invest in Digital Advertising Despite Industry Roadblocks…

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Fab Channels LivingSocial, Black Friday’s Tech

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.Fab’s Newest Distribution Channel: LivingSocial (The Wall Street Journal)… The Shrewd Shopper Carries a Smartphone (The New York Times)… Why Passbook Could Join Ping in the Apple Graveyard (GigaOm)…

Hyperlocal Video Finally Comes of Age

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Hyperlocal video has, until now, been basically an oxymoron. The local television stations push out a decent amount of video but it has a metro rather than a hyperlocal focus. Patch.com and other hyperlocal news networks have done a bit of video, but it remains expensive to produce and comparatively hard to monetize at lower traffic levels. This is why a platform like Glocal looks really, really interesting…

How SMBs Can Take Advantage of the Holiday Shopping Season

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To prepare for Black Friday and the rest of the holiday shopping season, SMBs need to research the lowest prices being displayed online for products they sell, and determine a pricing structure of “lowest online price + alpha” that will persuade a consumer to purchase from them…

Street Fight Daily: Foursquare’s Round, Apple’s New Patent

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.Investors Cool on Foursquare (The Wall Street Journal)… Apple Patents A System-Wide Event-Tracking And Geotagging System For iOS Devices (TechCrunch)… Three-way Tie-up Promises to Re-Invent Local News (Paid Content)…

USA Today Publisher Larry Kramer Looks to a Local Future

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“This whole company is hyperlocal,” Kramer says when asked about Gannett’s locally targeted news. “We’ve got 81 newspapers and 23 TV stations, all with local news operations.” At the new multipurpose “breaking news” desk he is developing, editors from the flagship paper will work face to face with representatives from local papers and other Gannett media properties…

Black Friday’s Local Opportunity: Taking Preprints Digital

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Publishers across the country give thanks for the fantastic single copy sales they get on Thanksgiving due to the bundle of preprint circulars that come with the paper ahead of Black Friday. But for quite some time people inside and outside of the newspaper industry have been discussing the fact that the preprint business is declining — and might go away altogether…

Google’s Local Offerings Have Gotten Too Complicated

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The extended Google+ Local rollout has been more troublesome than most. Usually when Google has experimented with social services in the past, such as Google Buzz and Google Wave, it has done so in a tangential way that does not threaten core functionality. With Google+, the gamble is to make social the center of all search activity, and yet the full realization of a social context for Google’s local search tools has yet to appear…

Case Study: Mattress Retailer Uses Targeting to Boost In-Store Sales

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At Innovative Mattress Solutions, online marketing director Brett Morris relies on display ads that work in tandem with his company’s print and television campaigns to promote holiday sales and in-store events. He uses geo-targeting to reach consumers living within a 15-mile radius of his company’s stores, and relies on different ad sets based on the demographics of the consumers he’s trying to hit…

Street Fight Daily: NYC Gets Local Discovery, Tiger Takes Stake in Groupon

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.New York City Replaces 250 Public Pay Phones with iPad-like Screens (GigaOm)… The World’s Hottest Hedge Fund Manager Thinks Groupon Stock Is A Good Deal (Forbes)… Basing Hotel Choice on Web Reviews May Be Bad Move (LA Times)…

Groupon ‘Goods’ Shows Ecommerce Isn’t an Answer to Deals Fatigue

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Part of what makes the margin for Groupon’s local commerce business so high is that the marketplace already exists. The supply networks, fulfillment methods, and customer base needed to keep a market running are already in place. Groupon was merely an accelerant — a facilitator of commerce within a given structure. Goods pushed the company into the marketplace business, and the variable risks and liabilities associated with the upkeep of a market…