In an exceptionally jargon-filled release, BloomReach appears to be announcing integration of its recently-acquired Hippo content management system with BloomReach’s AI-driven recommendation tools. The combined system ingests data from all sources to create a unified customer view, analyzes purchases and content consumption, and drives messaging across all digital channels.
Adtech vendors keep trying to profit from industry turmoil. Ad inventory marketplace Adfresco is a good example: trading on concerns about fully-automated ad buying, they now position their service as “bringing the human aspect back to automated buying and selling”. In concrete terms, this means that publishers can post inventory options online with a link to an account executive or sales team that must be contacted to make an actual purchase. Charmingly retro. I wonder if they offer drone-based martini delivery.
And still more about people-based marketing: Heap has technology that captures Web site behaviors without setting up tracking for each event individually. As the company puts it, they “automate away the annoying parts of analytics” so people can focus on the fun stuff. Behaviors can be tied to individuals, which isn’t always the case with Web analytics. The company just raised $27 million, for total funding of $40.2 million.
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.