In case you weren’t confused enough, CTV can also refer to Convergent TV. That’s how it’s used by Comcast Advertising-owned AudienceXpress, which sells across all screens. They just arranged for Epsilon clients to use their own first-party data and Epsilon’s third-party data for selection, targeting, and results measurement against AudienceXpress audiences.
The programmatic ad system is widely reviled as a hot mess, but tolerated because it expands audiences and saves a lot of work. So it’s not surprising that retail media, connected TV (CTV), and digital out of home are trying to replicate programmatic features. Supply side platform OpenX has announced a TV+, an on-going project to improve programmatic buying for CTV. First step is to remove resellers and non-TV content such as mobile apps from its bidding pool.
Hightouch continues to expand beyond its core business of extracting data from a warehouse. Their latest move is to buy HeadsUp, which predicts customer conversions and loads the results in to a customer profile. They still can’t resist calling themselves a “Composable CDP”, which makes exactly as much sense the Goodyear Tire Company calling itself a “Composable Auto Maker”.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.