Twenty-seven billion dollars will be spent in 2024 on data, data services and infrastructure in support of some $270 billion in U.S. media buying across data-driven channels according to a white paper from strategic consultancy Winterberry Group. This spend is set to surpass $33 billion by 2027. Also foreseen, the evolution of CDPs from “systems of record” to unified intelligence and data management platforms.

Proximic by Comscore’s natural language processing engine and AI contextual categorization technology will deliver to Epsilon insights into content including brand suitability and inventory quality in a new partnership. The contextual classifications will be used by Epsilon Digital, the company’s adtech platform. Contextual data is seen as increasingly valuable in an ad eco-system no longer supported by cookie-like tracking signals.

CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million.  It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge.  (See this blog post for more analysis.)