Here is today’s roundup of news related to local marketing and advertising, local media, technology, local commerce, consumer behavior and more.

Ad Buyers See Promise in Twitter’s Instagram-like Carousel Ads (October 17, 2016)
Digiday: “Some marketers are enticed by Twitter’s new Instagram-like carousel ad unit. The ads allow brands to aggregate multiple tweets into a carousel format that users can swipe through. Advertisers have been excited about the ads since news of their development broke in January. And in June, Twitter officially announced it was testing them out. But a few agencies reported that it wasn’t clear to them if the ads were still in pilot or if they had been opened up to all advertisers.”

Why Brands Need to Master Prompted Search (October 17, 2016)
Streetfight: “One of the highlights of autumn is seeing how merchants in small towns and suburbs rally around their local high school football teams. Local merchants connect themselves with their communities when they show their colors. In their own way, businesses that change their colors and their merchandise for the football season are adapting a brick-and-mortar form of prompted search marketing. Prompted search is an important form of location marketing that businesses need to understand to be agile and relevant.”

To Succeed in Mobile, Optimize the App Store Experience (October 17, 2016)
Ad Age: “Building a great mobile app is not enough for success. When planning your app marketing strategy, you probably sketched out a conversion funnel. But in that funnel is an un-skippable step over which you have very little control: the download page in the app store. This is one of the most common holes we see in the conversion funnel; it is created by misconceptions about the process of qualified user acquisition.”

What Google’s Experimental Content Podium Means for SEO (October 17, 2016)
Marketing Land: “What’s the deal with Google Posts? Columnist Tony Edwards explains this invite-only Google feature and discusses its potential implications for search marketers.”

Google On What’s Important for 2017: Machine Learning, AMP & Structured Data (October 17, 2017)
Search Engine Land: “Every year we like to get a Googler who is close with the ranking and search quality team to give us future thinking points to relay to the search marketing community. In part two of our interview with Gary Illyes of Google, we asked him that question. After a little bit of coercion, Illyes told us three things: Machine learning, AMP, and Structured data.”

Is Omnichannel Marketing Finally Going From Retail Dream to Reality? (October 16, 2016)
AdWeek: “There’s been a flurry of recent developments that suggest retailers this holiday season may summon the nerve to reboot their omnichannel marketing efforts, tapping into Big Data tactics that in years past may have seemed more like Big Brother.”