Street Fight Daily: Google Is Disrupting Local Event Discovery; Amazon Teams with Yext to Empower Local Businesses

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TOP STORIES IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING

Google Updates Search to Recommend Local Events Based on User Interests (Street Fight)
Google is bringing the personalization zeitgeist to local event recommendations. The company reported on its blog Thursday that it is releasing a series of new features that will make it easier for users to find essential information about events of interest to them right on search engine result pages.

Amazon Expands Alexa’s Brain With Yext Business Services (Bloomberg)
Amazon is adding the hours, addresses, and phone numbers of more than 1 million business locations to its Alexa digital-assistant platform so customers can access the information via voice command.

Advertising Helps Push Amazon’s Quarterly Profit to $2.5 Billion (AdExchanger)
The ecommerce giant’s “other” revenue category, where it houses advertising sales and services such as marketing measurement, cleared almost $2.2 billion, more than double the $945 million earned during the same period last year, according to the company’s earnings report, released Thursday.

Hires and Openings at Blis, TruMeasure, and Adzuna (Street Fight)
Every two or three weeks, Street Fight rounds up some of the latest hires and new openings in the hyperlocal marketing, tech, and media industries. This week’s edition includes moves and openings at Broadly, Cedato, Magisto, SiteSwan, and New York Magazine.

Raise Report: SessionM, Perch, Pointy Secure New Funding (Street Fight)
Every two or three weeks, we round up some of the biggest fundraises taking place in hyperlocal marketing, commerce, and tech. This week’s edition includes funding for Mention Me, Standard Cognition, Cogito, and Dialpad.

EMERGING TECH

Marketers Cool on VR, Shift Focus to AR (Digiday)
“VR is an interesting area for us in the future, but it’s far from becoming something we do at scale. AR, on the other hand, is one of the most immersive ways that we can get people experiencing the product without having to have it in their hands,” said Lego’s head of emerging platforms, James Poulter.

Bitcoin Is Ready for Digital Marketing; Is Digital Marketing Ready for Bitcoin? (MediaPost)
Karim Nassar: I’m a blockchain proponent, but I also believe that digital marketing must focus on solutions that leverage only the best elements of distributed-ledger tech.

THE LATEST IN SOCIAL

Facebook Has Acquired Redkix to Build Better Messaging for its Slack Competitor (Recode)
It’s unclear how Workplace plans to integrate Redkix’s technology, although it makes sense why Facebook would want it. Workplace, which is used internally by Facebook employees, is a lot like the regular, consumer version of Facebook.

Twitter’s User Growth Just Took a Big Hit (Fast Company)
A purge of bots, trolls, and other problematic accounts seems to have caused a noticeable decline in monthly active users for Twitter, which reported second-quarter 2018 earnings this morning before the opening bell.

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Joe Zappa is the Managing Editor of Street Fight. He has spearheaded the newsroom's editorial operations since 2018. Joe is an ad/martech veteran who has covered the space since 2015. You can contact him at [email protected]