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

Here Are Your 2019 Ad-to-Action Awards Finalists (January 29, 2019)
LSA Insider: “Today, the Local Search Association (LSA) announced finalists for the 2019 Ad-to-Action Awards. Now in its fourth year, the Awards recognize the top products, campaigns and software driving online-to-offline and local consumer actions. LSA received more than 80 submissions from media companies, agencies and technology providers from North America, Europe, India, Australia and Israel.”

Paid-Search Automation Not Ready for Prime Time (January 29, 2019)
LSA Insider: “Back in December I received an email from Google asking to develop a completely automated paid search campaign on behalf of my new digital marketing agency, Rithm Marketing. My guess is that this is part of a larger effort to test the company’s ability to build automated campaigns from end to end (keywords, to bids, to creative, etc.).”

Google adds voice input and spoken results to mobile web search (January 29, 2019)
Search Engine Land: “Google has added a microphone to the Google.com search field on Android phones to enable mobile web voice search. It’s an interesting move given that users could already do voice search on the mobile web, with the Android keyboard microphone.”

Two months in, Facebook Attribution gets mixed reviews (January 29, 2019)
Marketing Land: “In November, Facebook moved its attribution tool out of beta, making it available to all advertisers. The tool brings marketers on the platform one step closer to capturing an overview of the full customer journey, from the first touch point to conversion.”

Choice: The Ingredient That Drives Higher Mobile Engagement Across All Marketing Use Cases (January 29, 2019)
Street Fight: “Creating and implementing a mobile marketing strategy should tie into the preferred way each consumer wants to engage with retailers and brands via their mobile devices as well as the kind of messages they want to receive. In essence, this is the hallmark of an effective business engagement strategy for mobile users.”