Prescient AI collects data about a company’s sales and other business results and correlates that with advertising programs. It’s not as precise as direct attribution via third-party cookies or pixels, but also doesn’t rely on those being available – which they increasingly are not. Prescient just raised a $4.5 million seed round, on top of $1.7 million pre-seed funding in 2021.
The scare headlines for this report from CHEQ scream that fake traffic costs companies $142.8 billion in lost revenue, although a closer reading shows the actual ad budget spent on is closer to $35.7 billion, based on 5.9% of paid traffic being fake. Still, that’s enough to worry about. Download for interesting details by traffic type, region, and industry.
Despite years of warnings, 75% of respondents to this Adobe survey still rely heavily on third-party cookies: 45% spend half or more of their budgets on cookie-based activations. A shocking 41% are still not working to develop cookie-free alternatives, even though over three-quarters say cookie deprecation will hurt their business and they recognize at least 30% of their potential market already exists in cookieless environments.
It’s deal-making time for generative AI model builders and publishers who can provide them with quality data. Germany publishing giant Axel Springer is trading access to its data for Microsoft adtech, AI, and Azure hosting solutions. Meanwhile, The Financial Times has struck a deal with OpenAI to license its content with attribution of summaries and quotes.