Podcast platform Acast has launched a different flavor of audience-based targeting: it matches its own identify graph of podcast listeners with advertisers’ customer lists. The new capability doesn’t rely on cookies or device IDs, but does use IP address, which European regulators are now treating as personal data. But that’s okay: the new service is only available in the U.S. and Australia.
You may recall Firefly, which sells car-top and in-car ads on taxis and rideshare vehicles. Fun! They just added audience-based planning using individual-level data from Neustar. Marketers won’t target specific individuals but can identify the best placements to reach audiences with specified profiles.
As fines for Meta go, Turkey is well behind the EU and UK numbers, coming in at only $18.6 million, compared with $267 million and $70 million respectively. But, Turkey’s judgement that Meta obstructs its competitors by combining data from separate services it operates, threatens the core of its ad business, which is predicated on collecting and compiling data for profiles from its multiple services and being able to micro target using that information.
If you still think that MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig, well, the 1970’s want their disco ball back. Today’s hep cats know that MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a new-but-widely supported standard that lets large language models access structured data as context for their prompts. Early adopters include Salesforce and Adobe, and search platform Algolia is now using it to feed their data to customer-facing real-time AI agents.