Last Friday’s newsletter cited an Adweek article about global consultancies buying ad agencies. Here’s the other side of that coin: an Adweek piece on ad agencies building out their consultancy practices. The grand point being, that technology and marketing are becoming indistinguishably intertwined. You probably knew that.

Online/offline identity matcher LiveRamp also adds new partners all the time.  But its deal with Data Management Platform (DMP) vendor Lotame shows Lotame expanding beyond traditional DMP territory (anonymous profiles for ad audiences) to profiling known individuals across online and offline channels. That’s CDP turf.  Lots of DMPs are doing this. Free advice to buyers: ask pointed questions about how DMP technology supports a use case so different from its original purpose.

Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content.   But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines.  Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results.  We’ll see if competitors do the same.