Street Fight Daily: Facebook Sheds Young Users, Brands Move Marketing In-House

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

Facebook Is Shedding Those Coveted Gen-Z Users (Street Fight)
Less than half of the American internet population between ages 12 and 17 will use the social network this year, a drop from the past few years. Snapchat is poised to add almost 2 million users below the age of 25.

Follow-Up Thoughts on the SMB Marketing/Operations Universe (Street Fight)
“Regardless of the right package, the key for both agencies and small businesses is to choose best-of-breed components in each galaxy that integrate with each other so that you can add relevant and profitable services over time,” David Mihm writes to Mike Blumenthal in their bi-weekly column.

56% of Brands Plan to Move More Marketing In-House (Digiday)
Digiday’s survey also revealed a spike in how much marketing brands did internally in 2017, with all brands saying they performed at least some of their marketing in-house by year-end, up from 88 percent at the beginning of the year.

Dr. Soon-Shiong and His New ‘Patient,’ the L.A. Times: Will His Rx Be ‘Local?’ (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: My hunch is that Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong will find that applying advanced technology to local news is not as challenging as conquering cancer, especially if he listens to what Angelinos say is their biggest concern by a wide margin – getting from their home to work or other day-to-day destinations.

What It Would Take for Amazon to Become FedEx or UPS (WSJ)
Amazon.com Inc. may have ambitions to compete against FedEx Corp. and the United Parcel Service Inc. with its own shipping business. But the online retail giant is a long way from reaching the scale of America’s freight titans.

After Settling With Uber, Waymo Faces Bigger Challenges (NYT)
For Waymo, which grew out of Google’s seminal autonomous vehicle project and is nearly a decade into an effort that aims to change the very nature of transportation, a much bigger fight looms outside the courtroom.

Alibaba Invests Another $1.3 Billion into Offline Retail (TechCrunch)
Alibaba has furthered its physical retail footprint after it invested another billion dollars into projects to develop its so-called “new retail” strategy which combines online and offline.

Streaming Media Services Are Important Channel for Reaching Online Shoppers (Recode)
Some 46 percent of online shoppers in the U.S. pay a monthly subscription for online streaming media, like Spotify or Hulu, according to a new survey by consulting firm McKinsey.

Omnicom Built Its Own Private Marketplace for Location-Based Mobile Ads (AdWeek)
Marketers should use three factors to vet location data: Accuracy, precision and recency. In other words: Less is more in location-based advertising.

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