Finally, ad blocking recovery vendor Blockthrough has purchased adblocking analytics vendor Pagefair. Blockthrough serves a “safe, light, and un-intrusive ad experience” to adblock users who have opted into “Acceptable Ads”, recovering about 70% of the revenue that would otherwise be lost. This is at least vaguely interesting, right Dear Reader? Hello?
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the official start of the holiday shopping season. So let’s look at shopping behavior. We’ll start with a survey from real estate firm JLL Retail, which finds that just 31% of consumers expect to do most of their shopping in physical stores, although another 15% will buy online and pick up at a retailer. Just over half will make at least one purchase from their phone, up from 22% last year.
Ad optimization vendor Thunder Experience Cloud conducted a much more elaborate research project, analyzing billions of ad impressions to compare cookie- and device-based identification with people-based identification from LiveRamp. They found that cookie- and device-based methods report twice as many unique individuals as people-based methods. In other words, people-based measurement shows that the ads reached half as many different people and each person received twice as many impressions as cookie- and device-based measurement reported. The gap grew larger as campaigns got bigger.
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.