Street Fight Daily: Brands Sign on for Snap AR Push, Email Turns Up Big on Cyber Week

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Snapchat Gets $1 Million a Day for Branded Lenses (Digiday)
Snapchat’s 3-D augmented reality lenses are the newest marketing ploy that allows people to put virtual avatars or Bitmojis in a real-life setting. Brands like Budweiser, BMW and this month, McDonald’s have tested this AR development.

Google Websites — To Infinity and Beyond? (Street Fight)
“In the developing world, Google has a simplified path to the GMB where if a business first creates a website they can get verified more easily,” Mike Blumenthal notes. “Thus the website becomes the hook into Google’s data funnel. In the US, and most other developed countries, I would speculate that it is typically the other way around.”

Open and Read Rates Soar During Cyber Week (MediaPost)
Movable Ink, which powers content personalization within emails, recorded 438,760,191 email opens between the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. And people read them. Of the emails sent, 49% achieved read lengths of 15 seconds on Black Friday and 46% on Cyber Monday. 

Big Political Ad Spend Set for Local in 2018, but Will News Sites Be Ready? (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: Political ad spending totaling $1.9 billion will pour into the digital space, most of it on the local level, Borrell Associates estimates in its 2018 forecast. But daily newspapers and local news “pure-plays” will have to fight hard for their share against Facebook, Google and the other digital platforms.

At Cloud Summit, a Focus on the Transition to SaaS Services (Street Fight)
Peter Krasilovsky: ReachLocal’s CPO Kris Barton noted that SaaS churn is typically between 6 percent and 22 percent. Media churn is between 39 percent and 86 percent. The key is to provide an integrated marketing system, said Barton: “Sixty-four percent are more likely to use a marketing system when it is integrated with core business systems.”

How Amazon Picks Its Seemingly Random Deals of the Day (WSJ)
Christmas came early this year for Tea Forté Inc. Amazon selected the company’s loose-leaf tea samplers and tea-steeping mugs as some of its Cyber Monday deals, causing one sampler to skyrocket to No. 4 in Amazon’s grocery rankings, up from No. 588 the day before.

These Are the Three Fault Lines Redrawing the U.S. Media Business (Nieman Lab)
The duopoly, the FCC, and the hunger for scale — these three forces are roiling the news industry, from corporate conglomerates to your hometown daily.

SEO Is Not Enough in the Age of Voice (VentureBeat)
John Francis: We are finally getting into semantic search capabilities – and this has profound implications for brands, which need to adapt beyond SEO to participate in (and reap the benefits of) this emerging voice-powered landscape.

YouTube’s Brand-Safety Crackdown Puts Some Creators Out of Work (Bloomberg)
YouTube’s crackdown on inappropriate material is inadvertently depriving some creators of as much as 80 percent of their monthly sales, a blow to the very people who helped make the site the most popular place to watch video online.

Twitter Just Beefed Up Its Explore Function for Twitter Lite and Mobile Web (AdWeek)
Twitter users with poor connectivity will now have access to a more robust Explore experience following an update announced Friday.

Get Street Fight Daily in your inbox! Subscribe to our newsletter.