For delivering ads you might not want, Adobe has a technical triumph of its own: it has teamed up with online audio distributor TuneIn to serve ads on smart speakers such as Amazon Echo and Google Home. Chosen format is 90 second ads delivered twice an hour. The company says that targeting “at launch” is based on the type of content, perhaps implying that individual-level targeting will follow.
Fresh on the heels of its Time Warner acquisition, AT&T has announced plans to buy digital ad marketplace AppNexus. It will provide core technology for the TV advertising and analytics unit AT&T set up last August. AT&T has more than 170 million direct consumer relationships across its wireless, video, and broadband businesses. These could position it as an alternative to Facebook, Google, and others who control their own mass audiences.
A CDP is in place at nearly half (45%) of marketers surveyed by Forbes Insights for CDP vendor Treasure Data. One third (35%) of those with a CDP have seen some benefits already and 93% expect benefits within two years. The fraction seeing significant benefits is expected to grow from 1% now to 40% over that period. Download for lots of other good data about data sources, obstacles, and applications.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.