Street Fight Daily: Adapting to Google’s Control of Local Search Experience, Search Spend Drifts to Amazon

TODAY IN LOCAL & DIGITAL MARKETING AND MEDIA

Reality Check: Adapting to Google’s Ever-Growing Control of the Search Experience (Street Fight)
Blumenthal and Mihm: Google has been reducing the amount of traffic to local websites for a long time. And while it took a while to understand what was happening, it isn’t infuriating. Businesses can still get in front of customers and garner leads—it’s just not via their website.

Some Advertisers Move Half Their Search Budgets from Google to Amazon (CNBC)
Amazon’s ad business is booming. Some advertisers are moving more than half of the budget they normally spend with Google search to Amazon ads instead, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, according to execs at multiple media agencies.

What’s New For Marketers This Holiday Season? (Street Fight)
A new report indicates that email marketers with holiday-focused campaigns might inadvertently be lowering their open rates and hurting their chances at financial success during one of the most critical times of the year.

GDPR Is Leading to More Second-Party Data Deals (Digiday)
While the General Data Protection Regulation hasn’t decimated the digital advertising industry as once feared, it has accelerated demand for risk-free buying options.

How Gap Personalizes Marketing to Boost Results (Forbes)
To power its data-driven approach to personalized marketing, Gap built a sophisticated digital marketing tech stack. The centerpiece of the company’s efforts is a proprietary customer data platform (CDP), which enables Gap to create a unified view of the customer that can be leveraged for marketing.

A Year of Ad Tech in Review (MediaPost)
According to author Xavi Beumala, CEO and co-founder Marfeel, it has been a year of drastic change for the online publishing and ad tech industries, and we are bracing for even more changes before 2018 comes to a close.

Google Is Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers Following Security Lapse (Verge)
Google says Google+ currently has “low usage and engagement” and that 90 percent of Google+ user sessions last less than five seconds. Still, the company plans to keep the service alive for enterprise customers who use it to facilitate conversation among co-workers.

Facebook’s New Gadget Is a Video-Chat Screen With a Camera That Follows You (NYT)
Since 2004, Facebook has said it wants to bring the world closer together. To accomplish that goal, the company has relied mostly on the web and smartphone apps. But software is no longer enough.