CDP Institute

Scope3 Media Reporting has raised $25 million in new funding to support its mission to measure media and advertising carbon emissions and suggest optimizations that will reduce them. Brands that use Scope3 to reduce their emissions include Coca-Cola, General Motors and Mastercard. It now plans to address the growing threat of emissions caused by the use of AI.

Constant Contact, the digital marketing platform with a small business focus, will acquire the business of Txtify Technologies. Txtify specializes in mobile-first lead generation using customized microsites and surveys. The acquisition will help Constant Contact customers to create no-code mobile-optimized, branded lead generation forms in minutes.

News publishers have a new plan to beat the demonetization they suffer in the face of unrefined brand safety blocking tools. The solution is to create private marketplaces of trusted news sites that should not raise brand safety concerns; a kind of self-white listing. For example, publisher advisory firm Prohaska Consulting has launched the ProNews Collective with inventory available exclusively through its SSP partner Index Exchange.

Google lashed out at the Department of Justice’s threat to break up the company, calling the proposals “radical.” Among other things, Google says the proposals would threaten users’ privacy, stifle innovation and break Android and Chrome. Given the appeals process, it will likely be years before we know whether Google will stay in one piece.

West coast startup Infactory enjoyed a $4 million seed funding round for its online fact-checking proposition. Contrary to what you might assume, the company won’t check genAI outputs or use genAI to create its responses.  Rather, it will use AI to make trusted data sources more accessible to natural language queries.  That’s apparently enough for genAI-hungry investors.

The ad industry would have lost $11.78 billion to invalid traffic last year without ad fraud standards in place, according to a report by industry group TAG. The actual losses of $979 million mean a saving of $10.8 billion. More than 90% of ad spend flowed through TAG-certified companies.

In partnership with attention metrics provider Adelaide, The Trade Desk is now offering high attention inventory to advertisers. Attention — often based on reactions of opt-in panels to ads — is now competing with viewability as a valued attribute, and is being used to complement contextual metrics. Attention has been used in the past to test ads once they have been published; now it’s entering the pre-bid space.

The trend towards storing data in cloud data warehouses and activating it from there (through “composable” CDPs, for example) might run into an obstacle: cost. A survey of 500 data and IT leaders by Ocient finds that 68% are surprised by data analytics spend, while 40% say their data strategies are limited by cost. It’s the growing volume of data that is making it difficult to predict and manage costs.

YouTube ad platform Pixability has launched new AI-powered capabilities to identify videos suites to advertisers’ target audiences. Pixability has video-level data for 3.6 billion YouTube videos, more than any other third-party. The new solution detects types of video content that specific personas have engaged with in the past.

CDP and marketing cloud vendor Zeta Global announced an agreement to purchase LiveIntent, which helps companies do email-based advertising.  The deal will let Zeta expand its identity graph, enter the publisher monetization business, and accelerate its mobile and retail media products.  Zeta will pay $77.5 million in cash and $172.5 million in common stock, with potential for additional payments based on performance.

A U.S. District Judge in San Francisco has ruled that Google must open up Play, its app store, to competition, including making Android apps available from rival sources. Google is also restricted from paying device manufacturers to pre-install its app store. The ruling comes in a lawsuit brought by Epic Games; Google has said it will appeal.

Customer experience company Airship may be mobile-first, but its full range of capabilities developed for apps are now available on the web. This will allow CX teams to create unified experiences across apps, websites and other digital channels. Airship Journeys AI is available to create journeys, text and imagery across Airship-supported channels, particularly supporting the collection of zero-party data.