A consumer trend to shop during the best deals, and not necessarily on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, could throw a wrench into this year's holiday shopping season.

It has been a long haul for Google as its execs work to bring search advertising to the masses. The ads began serving on desktop devices and made their way to mobile, but the biggest challenge now is the inability of those ads to be seen.

Akamai is moving into optimization for campaigns and content by developing an adaptive learning engine that gathers real user and application data to determine how apps work in different situations and then automates changes in the process.

The move aims to drive app discovery in the App Stores in specific regions and will become available later this month.

Uber Technologies' machine-learning platform, Michelangelo, is designed to manage data, train, evaluate, and deploy models, and to make and monitor predictions. The system also supports traditional machine-learning models, time series forecasting, and deep learning.

The platform directly measures the search click through a redirect implemented by the advertiser. Wherever the click redirect is implemented, Placed is able to measure.

Analysts at Stone Temple Consulting interviewed nearly a dozen companies from various industries that had implemented AMP on most or all of their pages, including companies that the consulting firm helped with their implementation. The firm helped to build AMP pages to understand what's involved and asked about their own implementation process and issues, resulting metrics, and return on investments. The study analyzes various myths and shares key takeaways from the participating companies such as media publishers, lead-generation sites, and e-commerce.

When asked to name the top strategic marketing challenges, marketers cited measuring and providing return on investments, understanding omnichannel behavior, optimizing media investments, developing content for multiple media channels, and managing shrinking budgets.

On Wednesday Walmart went live with personalized voice shopping on Google. The deal allows consumers to shop the retailer's more than 2 million products with their voice rather than typing in a query on a webpage from their PC or phone.

On Tuesday, MLB announced a partnership with YouTube that names Google's video service a World Series partner. As the presenting sponsor, YouTube TV will have commercials and callouts during each game running on Fox.