Native Ad Revenue May Be One Click Away With ‘Selfies’

Share this:

Community news publishers everywhere are searching hard for new revenue. But who knew that dollars might be staring them virtually in the face? Broadstreet, which provides ad services to news publishers, is offering a new ad unit called the “Selfie” — short, self-generated messages that businesses and anybody else can place in the middle of an article to catch the eye of searching users. Broadstreet co-founder Kenny Katzgrau says the Selfie aims to lure businesses that want to get their message out, but are resistant to buying more expensive display ads…

How Training Has Helped Some Community Publishers Thrive

Share this:

“Getting money from local businesses is a street fight,” says Rusty Coats. “The options and alternatives seem to grow exponentially every day, and many businesses live in a fog of not knowing what to do. … That’s why I applaud these community news entrepreneurs and what they’re trying to accomplish. They are mission-driven and determined to build sustainable businesses by serving their communities.”

Using In-Store Analytics To Counter the Threat from Disruptive Digital Retailers

Share this:

Online retailers have successfully proven that leveraging analytics drives conversions and improves shopper experience. Indoor analytics provides these same invaluable insights to physical stores, closing the data gap between digital and brick-and-mortar environments…

Facebook’s Path to Dominating Mobile (Local TBD)

Share this:

Facebook Audience Network will apply Facebook’s audience targeting to third party apps, such as those using Facebook Connect for log-in authentication. The beauty of such an off-site network is that it uses Facebook’s data and positioning to continue milking demand for mobile ads, without killing the cow…

Five Trends That Will Shape the Future of Local Commerce

Share this:

Two decades after the first ecommerce site, the commerce landscape has begun to shift again. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a resurgence in innovation around mobile as technology companies develop new ways to bridge the gap between ecommerce and offline spending. Here are five trends, which will shape the future of commerce over the next decade…

Revenue Flowing Faster to New Marketing Channels, But Integration Is Key

Share this:

A recent advertising report from the IAB found that U.S. interactive advertising revenues hit an all-time high of $42.8 billion in 2013, with digital exceeding broadcast television advertising revenues ($40.1 billion) for the first time ever. But some brands who are succeeding at hyperlocal are integrating legacy channels rather than eliminating them…

Locable’s Aim: To Help Sites Build Community as a Brand

Share this:

Locable is a network of 50 local and hyperlocal websites that shows its “partners” how to build community around their brand. It does this through an approach it calls “Main Street for the 21st Century.” In this recent Q & A with Street Fight, the company’s co-founder and CEO Brian Ostrovsky talks about what this approach means, and how community sites can position themselves for success…

Putting Small Businesses on the (New) Google Map

Share this:

Google Maps is a key resource that businesses can use to get more local searchers to discover them online. But can it also help them get more leads? The simple answer is yes, but it’s a not as easy as simply claiming a listing. It’s only by taking advantage of all that Google Maps has to offer — and then tracking how traffic from your maps listing converts into leads and customers — that you can see just how powerful accurate, optimized maps listings can be…

Niche Site CHARLIE Goes Big With Underwriter Le Creuset

Share this:

After an initial stint doing publicity in the movie industry in Los Angeles, Caroline Nuttall migrated to Charleston, S.C., and fell “head over heels” for its “beauty and progressive culture.” She expressed her passion for the city by creating the local digital magazine CHARLIE, whose words, images and design capture the many faceted, old-new richness of her publication’s namesake. Here Nuttall tells Street Fight how she navigated CHARLIE to new revenue streams, including an underwriting partnership with national cookware maker Le Creuset.

Recent Studies Show Mobile’s Broadening Reach

Share this:

The reports underline what we might call the inherently local nature of mobile search. Whether you are in a store contemplating a high-ticket purchase or downtown hoping to discover a new restaurant, the phone in your hand is your portal to timely and actionable information as well as marketing incentives that are increasingly likely to gain your attention…

Reconsidering Location for On-the-Go Consumers

Share this:

Out-of-home works because it is exactly what its name implies. That’s a powerful advantage. But with great power comes great responsibility. And in order to capitalize on this advantage, we need to re-think our approach. Once we start regarding out-of-home as a behavior (specifically, of consumers on-the-go) instead of just a set of location-specific screens, our success is almost guaranteed…

How a Connecticut Network Helps ‘Indie’ News Sites Bridge Revenue Gap

Share this:

Networks of independent community news sites are growing up and expanding out, and one of the biggest is the three-year-old Independent Media Network, which provides multiple layers of services — in advertising, editorial, business and tech — to more than a hundred community and other news operations in Connecticut…

A New Way to Think About Local: Last Mile Advertising

Share this:

While advertisers today seek to take advantage of an increasingly fragmented media environment, those focused on local advertising have different challenges and opportunities in that they are in closer proximity to the point of purchase. Even with the tremendous growth of online shopping and e-commerce, two-thirds of all local purchases are still taking place in-person at brick-and-mortar locations…

Probabilistic Device Matching Isn’t Perfect — But It Works

Share this:

The use of probabilistic matching or statistical IDs to link multiple devices to an individual is often dismissed based on dubious accuracy. It’s true that the practice will never be 100% accurate, but even taking the conservative estimate at the lower end of this range, probabilistic matching enables marketers to scale their mobile advertising campaigns with reasonable expectations of performance…

Discovering Common Ground Among ‘Indie’ and Corporate Hyperlocal Sites

Share this:

The digital Grand Canyon that has divided independent and corporate hyperlocal news sites is not looking so immense lately. The “indies” and the corporates are still kicking up a lot of dust in their community-by-community competition. But these rivals are changing their operations and strategies in ways that make them look more alike than different…

Is Facebook Paper the Wake-up Call Publishers Need?

Share this:

Media companies and publishers need to take a page from Facebook and other fast-moving digital properties. These digital entities are giving readers what they want while using what they know about users to “make a killing” with ads. Publishers who were virtually sidelined by these digital powerhouse companies can now get back in the game by adopting a Zuckerberg move: creating the right conditions and culture…

Phone Leads for Local Businesses: The Unsexy Cousin of the Click (Part II)

Share this:

Beyond bringing in big leads — and SMBs paying handsomely for them — call monetization will be compelled by something else: Opportunity cost. We forecast call volume to SMBs to explode (65 billion by 2016) as a result of increasing mobile usage trends. That’s going to mean a whole lot of calls to answer…

Why Mobile Marketing Needs to Evolve Past Physical Location

Share this:

In order for location targeting to be effective, marketers must think beyond just physical location or proximity to their store. It means moving beyond the traditional mindset of ‘who’ you are trying to reach to include ‘where are they,’ ‘what are they doing,’ ‘what are their interests’ or even ‘what might their intentions be,’ based on past behavior…

Why In-Store Messaging Needs Offline Measurement

Share this:

Offline, in-store environments historically have had limited tools for measuring impact of any marketing effectiveness, reach, or exposure. But mobile location technologies with geofence capability measure shopper behavior and produce actionable data sets, opening new opportunities to quantify messaging impact. Measurement is not only possible, but actionable…

LBMA Podcast: Mobile Mixed Founder Talks SMS Marketing

Share this:

Welcome to This Week in Location Based Marketing, a weekly video podcast from the Location Based Marketing Association. Top stories of the week include Sears offering curbside pickup; Virgin America’s new in-air social network; augmented reality on the bus; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago’s interactive billboard; Localytics brings in $17M in funding; and Yahoo! partners with Yelp…