AT&T Interactive VP: The Future of the Local Ad Stack
With a little over 1 billion in yearly revenues, AT&T Interactive, the offshoot of AT&T Inc. that handles its digital advertising efforts, has grown substantially, leveraging the massive sales network associated with the yellow pages print business to create a handful of digital advertising products with a deep roster of local advertisers…
Case Study: Deals Earns Restaurant 30% Repeat Business and $120,000
In Winnetka, Illinois, chef Michael Lachowicz has strong opinions on what it takes to run successful daily deal promotions. Lachowicz has run six Groupon deals at his establishment, Restaurant Michael, resulting in more than 5,000 coupons sold and $120,000 in revenue generated in the last two years. He estimates that 30% of coupon buyers have returned after their vouchers were redeemed, and says he’s negotiated a deal with Groupon to get 90% of his payouts just two days after his deals end.
Case Study: CKE’s Own Check-In App Lends Accountability and Control
How does a restaurant group with 3,000 locations spread across 43 states manage a robust location-based rewards program without sacrificing functionality or flexibility? For Brad Rosenberg, manager of digital strategy and marketing for CKE Restaurants — which owns the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s fast-food chains — the answer was to build a mobile app that could work across multiple point-of-sale systems and still provide the accountability that individual franchise owners require…
Opening Up the ‘Walled Garden’: Content APIs and the Location Layer
For small-radius media, in which location plays a far greater role than niche or national media, walling off content will substantially impede industry growth. Ignoring LBS as a viable distribution channel is tantamount to leaving the industry’s most valuable asset grossly under-leveraged.
Off-Campus Events Go Hyperlocal With Student Guide Lokalite
Location-centric events site Lokalite aims to give college students an off-campus guide to local events, bringing a new set of loyal customers to small businesses. Street Fight caught up with CEO Will Powers recently to discuss how his company facilitates those relationships, and why campuses are a particularly ripe market for hyperlocal…
Local Quotables: Seth Priebatsch, Chris Dixon, Dan Street and more…
Chris Dixon sends kudos to Foursquare’s latest release; Seth Priebatsch gets excited about the evolution of money as it moves further online; Steve Buttry gets an endorsement; Josh Fenton talks hyperlocal publishing success; and Dan Street describes the evolution of local as “not a search problem.”
Using Images to Spur Location-Based ‘Discovery’
Trover’s co-founder and CEO, Jason Karas, likens the photo-sharing location-based service to people “leaving breadcrumbs” for one another — places to discover nearby, with notes to give context. Street Fight recently caught up with Karas to talk about how the app works, why Trover is different from other photo-sharing sites, and how the “discovery” space is evolving…
Case Study: At Choice Hotels, a Check-In Consolidator is Key
For nearly a year, Choice Hotels has been running a special offer that rewards members of its Choice Privileges program with 50 extra points each time they check-in on Foursquare, Facebook, or Gowalla at more than 1,500 participating properties. By partnering with Topguest, Choice has been able to use LBS to build customer engagement without worrying about managing the infrastructure that a large-scale program requires…
Loku CEO: Leveraging Data to Make Sense of Hyperlocal Search
In 2010, private equity manager-turned-entrepreneur Dan Street launched a two-year quest to create a search engine capable of synthesizing and analyzing the vast landscape of hyperlocal information. The result was Loku, a hyperlocal information hub that draws on big data tools to make sense of local search through dynamic analysis and a clean presentation of hyperlocal content…
Case Study: Park District Picks Patch and Sees 25% Growth
At the Downers Grove Park District in Downers Grove, Illinois, (pop. 48,724) Brandi Beckley decides which channels to use to draw residents to events. She has relied heavily on hyperlocal sites like Patch, TribLocal, and MySuburbanLife because of the targeted audiences that these publications provide…
DNAinfo Expands — As Does NYC’s Rep as Hyperlocal Incubator
With its expansion, DNAinfo joins a new class of hyperlocal companies — led by tech startups like Foursquare — that were spawned in New York City and now are in the process of scaling their products into other markets. New York (and Manhattan in particular) has become a hotbed of hyperlocal activity in recent years…
Case Study: How One Agency Helps National Brands Go Hyperlocal
It’s Ron Blevins’ goal to help agencies help brands navigate the world of hyperlocal media. As the vice president of digital strategy for Novus, an ad agency owned by conglomerate Omnicom that is focused solely on the local space, he has seen brands move from newspapers to hyperlocal sites, where they are finding more trust and loyalty — in some cases a 20% increase in ROI over national sites…
Case Study: DFW Airport Uses LBS Offers to Spur Traveler Spending
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport is a massive, luxurious airport that in some areas resembles an upscale mall. Many of the travelers who passed through, the airport found, were tech-savvy. 84% owned smartphones and 36% were checking in on location-based services while waiting to board their flights. So to connect these travelers to the stores near their […]
Case Study: Non-Profit Uses Foursquare For Fundraising
At BART stations in the Bay Area in 2010, commuters were encouraged to check-in on Foursquare to posters placed by Earthjustice, a non-profit focused on environmental awareness, as part of an effort to gain traction in the tech community. They hit 6,000 in just a few months’ time and earned media as well, in the New York Times, Mashable and elsewhere. Senior marketing manager Ray Wan discusses the organization’s strategy.
BiteHunter CEO: Learning From Kayak
BiteHunter launched amid the height of deal mania this Spring, as an aggregator for dining deals. With the June launch of its iPhone application and subsequent addition of instant deals to the mobile product last week, the company has grown into a real-time search engine for dining deals. Street Fight recently spoke with the company’s CEO, Gil Harel, a veteran in the dining vertical, about the aggregation industry and the variable future of the deals space…
#SFS11 Company Profile: SCVNGR/LevelUp
SCVNGR is a mobile marketing platform that uses location-based game mechanics to improve engagement with brands. Since 2010, the company has partnered up with Dunkin’ Donuts, Swarovski, and numerous universities to build custom marketing campaigns on top of its mobile application. At the same time, the company has seen solid engagement with its rewards product aimed at small and medium size merchants…