Is better data a privacy invasion, marketing boon, or a bit of both? Making the case for marketing, location data vendor Factual reports that 87% of mobile marketers say they gain value from location-based targeting, using it to target ads, location-based offers, and personalization. So that’s a good thing, right? Everybody loves a well-targeted offer.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is having its Connections conference this week, which has generated some news. First up, integration of Marketing Cloud with Google Analytics 360 to make journey analytics from each system visible in the other. According to this TechCrunch piece, Salesforce makes clear they are not sharing individual-level data. Ability to push audiences from Google Analytics 360 to Salesforce (and apparently other systems) is due for beta release later this year.
Small business customer communication system Podium announced a $60 million in Series B, bringing its total to $92.6 million. Podium supports online messaging, chat, surveys, and review management. The company has nearly 20,000 businesses as customers.
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.