Aqfer has updated its marketing data lake platform, which lets technical experts build unified customer databases. Aqfer occasionally refers to itself as a CDP but CDPs are defined as packaged software, not developer toolkits. IT departments looking to build a CDP alternative will be interested.
You weren’t terribly interested in yesterday’s items about IT tools to build unified databases, Dear Reader. But I’ll double down with news that Google Cloud and Informatica have announced a strategic partnership along the same lines. At least they are familiar company names. Informatica also announced a partnership with analytics data platform Databricks. You’ll recall Informatica bought the Allsight CDP in March.
Still catching up from last week: media services provider Brand Network bought Clickable, an advertising management and reporting firm. The combined operation has been rebranded as Azalea Commerce which will help retailers sell advertising on their Web sites. Let a thousand walled gardens bloom!
YouTube is not just a video platform, of course, it’s also a powerful search engine and it has begun testing a Google AI Overviews carousel that will appear in results for selected queries. Given the threat AI Overviews is perceived to pose to click-thru traffic in Google Search results, there’s a question about whether the YouTube initiative could depress click-thrus to brand and creator videos. Right now, the feature is only visible to a sub-set of U.S. premium users.