Television may be losing ground to Internet advertising but it’s far from dead. In fact, it’s being reborn as a highly targeted medium by companies like 4INFO, which maps multiple devices back to TV households. Cadent, which sells ads across traditional and non-traditional TV, just bought 4INFO to bolster its cross-channel capabilities.
I guess we’ll eventually feel that privacy technology is over-hyped and stop paying attention to it. But that hasn’t happened yet, so you probably still care that BigID has just raised a $50 million Series D, bringing their total funding to $146 million. BigID helps companies find personal data in their systems and has recently added products to fulfill data access requests under privacy regulations.
Even Jamie, our tireless Senior Intern in the Department of Obvious, doesn’t have much today. He did find a Socialbakers report that 96% of paid social ads are viewed on mobile devices. Also: Walmart is the most common brand associated with Instagram influencers, which must mean something but I don’t know what.
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.