Among digital media formats, some of the greatest growth over the past five years has been in gaming. That includes mobile gaming, console gaming, and of course the explosion of eSports and streaming through networks like Twitch. All of this has inflected further in the Covid era. Tracing these trends back to the advertising and commerce worlds that Street Fight covers, the appetite for gaming has inspired ad tech players to maximize interactivity through, among other methods, the...

What can one learn through a combination of the Peace Corps, CPA training, and the ad tech world? On Street Fight’s Heard on the Street Podcast, we often talk about the virtues of “cross-training” in a given career path. Perhaps no one embodies that principle more than VRTCAL founder Todd Wooten. As the latest guest on the show, Wooten summarizes the above journey and advice for younger executives. Among the lessons: Be knowledgeable about the job of everyone you manage. You don’t have to...

Brand advertising has gone through a transformative period... and we're not talking about a pandemic. Of course, the entire ad world has been upended in the past six months, but ample change was already underway beforehand. The evolution of customer data and in-housing are two factors driving brand advertising's transformation. One company that is natively primed for this ongoing transformation is Digilant. As we discussed with CEO Raquel Rosenthal on the latest episode of Heard on the...

Location intelligence is a hot topic. Demand is growing, startups continue to enter the market, and location privacy sensitivity (including government regulation) is hitting new peaks. Growing demand results from not just greater need for location intelligence but also broadened areas of applicability. In other words,  location intelligence is expanding beyond its well-known uses for advertising (ad targeting, attribution, etc.), supporting enterprises in a number of other ways. That...

The thing about local commerce is that nearly every technology and macro trend in the tech world touches it. Just like all politics is local, all tech is local. But some technologies apply more than others. Mobile proximity payments to order and pay for your latte are more "local" than, say, blockchain. Another technology currently emerging has a deep and fundamental alignment with local: augmented reality. AR is inherently conducive to local commerce, as geo-anchoring aspects of the...

We've all heard of out-of-home advertising: staples such as billboards and subway ads. Audio is one of the oldest forms of advertising, from terrestrial radio to pandora. Shopper marketing has been around for decades to steer in-store shoppers with last-mile messaging. These are all common staples of local advertising. But combine them, and you may have something interesting. This combination of OOH, audio, and shopper marketing is what Vibenomics calls audio out-of-home. It gives...

It's probably fair to say that digital distribution and measurement have accomplished their takeover of media and advertising. Fifteen years ago, print ruled in priority and political capital at magazine and newspaper publishers. Their digital and online counterparts were mostly an afterthought. Now the situation is reversed in many respects. Digital gets all the attention. And rightly so: it legitimately has more robust capability to do things like target audiences and measure results....

Location intelligence continues to be a foundational component of the local media and commerce industries. During the smartphone era, the topic has kept us busy, including its many moving parts like the underlying tech, the privacy environment, and emerging factors like 5G. Meanwhile, bringing new dimension (literally) to location data is the field of "3D location." This essentially takes typical lat/long coordinates and adds a Z-axis. It brings new meaning in the form of elevation, which...

When most people hear the term "out-of-home" advertising (OOH), they think of old-school billboards and bus kiosks. Those are still staples of the category, but its growth and innovation are being defined by other approaches at the intersection of physical media and digital targeting. "People instantaneously think billboards, but it literally can be wrapping a ferry going to a music festival for a brand and throwing a party on said ferry," said Quan Media Group Founder & CEO Brian...

In addition to the coronavirus-fueled downturn, the mobile ad world is facing industry-specific challenges that will reshape the industry in the coming years. As public and private sector privacy measures make it harder than ever to process consumer movement data, the ad tech landscape will be defined by leaders who can innovate creative ways to obtain and process meaningful consumer insights. As we've examined, that's sometimes a matter of network effect. Foursquare has taken that...

The mobile advertising world continues to shift dynamically as both public and private sector influences reshape ad targeting and data collection practices. The phasing out of third-party cookies and increased privacy regulations, coupled now with the financial pressure related to Covid-19, make 2020 an especially challenging year for marketing tech. At the center of all of this is Semcasting, whose CEO and founder Ray Kingman is the latest guest on Street Fight's Heard on the Street...

As ad tech continues to advance and programmatic becomes de rigueur, you'd think managing advertising would be easier for publishers. But in some ways, it's gotten more difficult for publishers to monetize content and optimize ad placement through complex tech stacks while focusing on their primary function: content. This is where Freestar comes in. As we heard from company president Kurt Donnell on the latest episode of Street Fight's Heard on the Street podcast (listen above), Freestar...

Insurance is typically viewed as an old-school industry that's not very sexy. But Cambridge Mobile Telematics VP Ryan McMahon thinks insurance gets a bad wrap in that respect. As the latest guest on Street Fight's Heard on the Street podcast, his company is innovating actuarial work and safer roads. McMahon's firm accomplishes that by capitalizing on the powerful computer we all carry around (and drive around) in our pockets. Given all its sensors like GPS and accelerometers, the modern...

Video as a medium continues to gain prevalence given better bandwidth, mobile connectivity, and cultural factors. Creation and distribution tools also continue to democratize "pro-sumer" video like TikTok. But at the professional end of the scale, quality production is still expensive and hard to find. This is the segment of the video market that Stringr addresses. The company has created a sort of networked marketplace to connect supply and demand for video creation. That includes...

Two media consumption trends stick out from the last decade. The first is that video continues to gain prevalence given better bandwidth, mobile connectivity and cultural factors. The second is that our attention is increasingly fragmented between screens and delivery platforms, such as streaming apps. Tremor Video has positioned itself at the center of that two-way intersection. The company provides a video creation and distribution engine to maximize impact for brand marketers, according...

One elusive component of effective marketing is knowing what consumers are thinking. But even with advances in AI, traditional ad targeting practices often commit basic errors like showing people the same ad several times ... even though they may not be interested in any way in the product in question. This is the area where Viral Gains is innovating. The latest guest on Street Fight’s Heard on the Street podcast, Viral Gains CEO Tod Loofbourrow tells us how his longstanding affinity for...

As much as we love computing, the best technology is that which disappears. Most components of computing are an abstraction layer that stands between you and a given task or experience. That's the case with layers of the typical consumer tech stack including operating systems, inputs, and apps. It's the latter that has spiraled out of control in the mobile era. This has led to app fatigue in these siloed packages that deliver us mobile experiences. It's arguably not the best architecture,...

One of the most consequential topics to emerge in local commerce in 2019 (and our upcoming editorial focus for the month of January) is the location-based ad industry’s looming privacy winter. Due to regulations like CCPA, as well as privacy restrictions at the mobile OS level, the bar will be raised for collecting location and movement data. That could likewise raise barriers to entry in location-intelligence and even lead to a market shakeout, considering the abundance of companies that...

The location intelligence sector has gotten crowded in the past five years, making it harder and harder to stand out from the crowd. Making matters more difficult, there are looming restrictions such as location tracking in iOS13 and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). These factors could raise barriers to entry and cause an industry shakeout where only the strongest survive. On the list of longstanding industry players with extensive networks and location intelligence chops is...

The word "platform" is thrown around a lot these days. It's sometimes invoked for the sake of PR positioning, sometimes to make something sound more sophisticated than it is, but often the technology being described is really more of an application. A true platform is a central point in an ecosystem of apps that can be launched and managed from one place. This is the definition that Sparkfly embodies. As I discussed with founder and CEO Catherine Tabor on the latest episode of Heard on the...

Location intelligence continues to be a hot subsector of local media and commerce. Demand is growing, providers continue to enter the market, and location privacy sensitivity is hitting historical peaks. As that all happens, the survivors will be those who differentiate themselves from the pack. With that backdrop, some location intelligence providers zero in on specific types of location signals. For example, can local events be a focal point for gathering consumer behavior and insights?...

Location Intelligence is a hot topic these days as demand grows, providers continue to enter the market, and location privacy sensitivity hits historical peaks. Growing demand results from not just greater need for location intelligence but also broadened areas of applicability. In other words, beyond the advertising uses for location intelligence (ad targeting, attribution, etc.), it's being applied to other areas of enterprise support. That includes everything from supply chain...

A longstanding challenge in location-targeted mobile advertising is that location signals are often imprecise. If you can get a user to opt-in at the app level to share location, you can get the coveted GPS signal. But that opt-in is hard to come by, especially when a given app has nothing to do with location. So, ad networks will sometimes revert to the next best thing, which is cell tower triangulation or IP address, which can be off my miles. There's nothing inherently wrong with these...

Disruption is one of the only constants in the tech and media worlds. So, the question becomes how to successfully disrupt (or survive others' disruption). These are topics that author, analyst, and thought leader Charlene Li has synthesized in her latest book The Disruption Mindset. To commemorate the book release this week, we recently had Li join us as a special guest on Street Fight's podcast Heard on the Street. As we discussed on the show, a common success factor for companies...