Google Local Packs Not Showing for 'Marketing' Industry

About a month ago, we were putting together a training presentation for a client and needed some industry-specific slides to show local results in SERPs. The company does mainly web design, so we thought we'd show a slide of "Minneapolis web design" results to point out the traffic they were missing from local listings. (They didn't have a Google Local Business Center account.)

Imagine our surprise when we couldn't find any 7-pack results for our queries. Whether using a geographic modifier or not, the Google local results were eerily absent for web design/development keywords. What was going on? Mike Blumenthal called out this issue on November 24th with his article about the apparent web design 7-pack 'bug' which seemed to be affecting only web design and development searches, so it seemed we weren't the only ones to notice.

Google has known about this issue since then, and possibly even before. This whole avalanche was evidently started by the "one web box result bug"- wherein only 1 local listing would show where the pack of 7 was supposed to - but it seems in fixing that bug, they created this new one. Not only has the 'web design bug' not been fixed (it has a LOT of people asking "When Will Google Fix the Web Design Local Pack Bug?"); the 7-pack is now not showing up for virtually any marketing/advertising type queries:




However, it seems just about any other profession - outside of marketing - is still getting local love (with or without geography; we've added it here to show the results higher up on the SERP):




But, is the 'bug' - for those industries not currently showing up in the Google 7-pack - partially fixed? We noticed for some searches local listings can appear:


It appears with this formula: "industry/service + in + city" at least a 3-pack will show, if not the entire 7-pack. But, is this the way people are searching? Also...is this a 'bug' at all?

The reason we're beating the dead horse here is simply because of the loss of traffic. While we've noticed an overall decline (due to the holiday season), we've noticed the traffic from Google Local has taken a nose-dive. This only makes sense, since those listings are no longer showing (or, if they are, it's severely less frequently than previously). This raises a good question: if so much traffic was coming in via local listings, obviously searchers like and use them. So, do searchers miss their local query map results?
A final question - let's pose it as 'open' - to Google: when will this 7-pack 'bug' be fixed, if at all?

***Addendum***
Alas, it seems this was/is not a case of Google fixing a 'bug,' rather, it was the instigation of a new method. Said method being, simply, Google no longer shows any marketing/advertising/web design/SEO type results within the 7-pack of local listings (previously referred to as the 10-pack). According to "Joel H." of Google,

Today, we're intentionally showing less local results for web design / SEO queries. For example, [web design sacramento] doesn't display local listings today. We believe this is an accurate representation of user intent. In some cases, we do show local listings...[web design in bellingham]. I'm sure some of you feel we should be displaying local results for queries like [Web Design Vancouver]. I understand that concern, but based on our understanding of our users, we feel this is the right decision for now.


I'll give the usual disclaimer that we're constantly working on improving the user experience and results will vary over time. So, this could change in the future, but I wanted to be explicit about what we're doing today.


So that's that!