CDP Institute

LinkedIn has purchased advertising analytics startup Oribi, which helps companies to measure website conversions.  The move will support LinkedIn’s burgeoning “marketing solutions” business, which the company said grew 43% year-on-year.  I think “marketing solutions” means advertising.

Metadata.io calls itself “the operating system for B2B marketers”, which is a bit grandiose.  But what they do, which is use AI to automate and optimize paid ad campaigns, including lead enrichment, is still pretty impressive.  They just raised a $40 million Series B to do more of it.

Salesforce announced a deal to buy Traction on Demand, a consultancy specializing in building solutions on Salesforce platforms.  They’re reportedly the largest in the industry, with about 1,500 people if LinkedIn has it right.  We don’t usually report on consultancy acquisitions, but this does give an idea of what Salesforce thinks will drive more sales.

You have to admire the tenacity of adtech folk trying to salvage their ability to target individuals.  The Trade Desk and LiveRamp have announced a plan work with Eureopan partners to build a GDPR-complaint identity solution, EUID.  The foundations will be LiveRamp’s RampID and The Trade Desk-developed Unified ID 2.0.  In theory, it’s all based on consented, first-party data, but newly-aggressive European regulators may take a closer look than they have in the past.

IAB Tech Lab is doing its bit to ensure ads remain targeted.  They released a specification of Seller Defined Audiences, which creates standardized taxonomy for audiences based on publishers’ first party data.  The taxonomy IDs will be used in programmatic ad bidding.

Ad sales platform Magnite has purchased Carbon, which helps publishers optimize their ad revenue through a combination of advertising, content,  and audience analytics.  You won’t be surprised they position this as a way to make better use of first party data, which I’m beginning to think is ready for its own theme park.

Podcasts are growing quickly, as you’ve probably heard.  LinkedIn is jumping in with its own podcast network, which will feature many existing shows and presumably add some new voices.  The special sauce will be features to encourage interaction between the talkers and listeners.

Now’s a good time to worry about reliable information.  NewsGuard, which rates the credibility of online news sources, has integrated its data with social listening platform Pulsar, which tracks online topics and audiences.  The deal will help Pulsar customers better understand the sources of misinformation.

Nothing’s more fun than cutting out a middleman or two. Media buying agency GroupM has set up a marketplace with direct access to programmatic display, video, and connected TV inventory from supply side platforms Pubmatic and Magnite. If that sounds familiar, you may be thinking of the marketplace that The Trade Desk launched two weeks ago to buy direct from premium publishers.