Amazon has several new tools for companies that sell on its platform. These include a Buy with Prime page within brand storefronts on Amazon, customizable Sponsored Brand ads, co-branded ads on Facebook and Instagram, and free email promotions to repeat, recent, and high-spend customers. But it’s not all wine and roses in Seattle: California just filed an anti-trust suit over Amazon pricing policies.
Salesforce is warming up for next week’s Dreamforce conference with a bundle of product announcements. Today it focused on Customer 360, which makes unified customer profiles available for applications across the Sales, Service, Marketing, and Commerce Clouds. That may sound like a CDP, but don’t be confused: the Salesforce CDP still exists as part of the Marketing Cloud. On second thought, it’s okay to be confused.
Google also offers marketing tools to its friends. The latest goodies help publishers build audience and contextual segments, matching standards set by IAB Tech Lab’s Seller Defined Audiences. They’re also giving publishers more control over what data is shared with partners and how often the same person sees an ad on an app. But there’s rain on their parade too: new class action suits in the EU and UK alleging Google reduced publishers’ ad revenue, and a rejected appeal of a $4+ billion EU fine for forcing phone manufacturers to... Read More >
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.