CDP Institute

Trackers gonna track: SXM Media, the ad sales arm of SiriusXM, Pandora, and Stitcher, has launched a cooklieless personal identifier to track its listeners.  The system collects “a variety of consented listener signals and inputs” to determine which devices belong to the same individual, and uses the resulting “AudioID” for ad targeting and measurement.  Initial deployments will be limited to SXM Media’s own properties but the company plans to add audiences on other platforms later this year.

MNTN helps direct response advertisers sell on streaming TV networks.  They’re on a roll, having just bought Ryan Reynolds’ ad agency Maximum Effort and video creation platform QuickFrame.   That all costs money, so their latest acquisition is a pile of 119 million U.S. dollars.  The round triples their total funding from a prior total of $64.8 million.

There’s not much novelty left in artificial intelligence or no-code tech, and even the combination is a bit of a yawn. Still CausaLens gets a second look because their $45 million Series A will go to AI using “cause and effect” logic instead of basic correlations and pattern recognition. In case you do want more AI information, here’s a Persado study that finds 54% of companies are already using it to create personalized experiences and all but 7% plan to join them.

Remote access – excuse me, “digital workspace” – tech vendor Citrix was just bought by Vista Equity Partners and friends for $16.5 billion.  That’s only sort of interesting, but Vista announced they plan to combine Citrix with data analytics vendor TIBCO, a bauble they’ve owned since 2014.  And data analytics is something we care about, right?

Did someone mention data analytics?  Oh, it was me.  Now that I mention it, here’s a study from Sisense that reports 96% of digital product managers think their customers want them to embed personalized, AI-driven insights into their products, and most think the customers would pay to get it.  Is that an itch you’ve been eager to scratch, Dear Reader?

This Wpromote report has lots of interesting information about marketing budgets, including the surprising news that retail media is already starting to lose importance.  But I’m only writing about it because they mentioned “brandstanding” (brands taking a stand on public issues), which is a new buzzword to me.  I am easily amused.