CDP Institute

One of the bigger problems with streaming TV advertising is knowing which ads are actually seen.  So you might think that letting YouTube TV viewers watch up to four live streams at once would raise some concerns about reduced ad impact.  But rumor has it that multi-streaming is in the works at Google, with a particular eye on sports fans who like to watch multiple games at the same time.

TV might let you be in four places at once, but the physical world still has its constraints.  Instacart is doing its best to reduce them.  Their latest effort is a program to deliver big objects like furniture on the day you order them.  It’s not quite teleportation but we’re getting there.

Twitter is grasping for its piece of the booming podcast industry with an expansion of its Spaces audio conversation hub. The service will include algorithmic recommendations of podcasts that users might like. Spaces works best on the Twitter mobile app, so if you don’t use that, you’re pretty much out of luck.

You may have heard that podcasts occasionally include information that is not entirely accurate.  Shocking but true!  Google-backed research has found the “prebunking” with cartoon videos can help users recognize common misinformation techniques such as ad hominem attacks and false dichotomies.  The researchers seem pleased to find a 5% improvement in ability recognize such techniques within 24 hours of viewing the education videos.  Raise your hand if you think that’s enough to matter.

Here’s more science: Octave Audio reports that users who voice a brand’s name in response to a smart speaker show a 30% higher brain response than users who hear an ad without saying the brand name.  It’s not clear how that translates into conventional metrics like brand awareness and recall, but presumably it’s an improvement.  As Teen Talk Barbie might say, neuroscience is tough.

Data clean rooms let companies match consumer identities without revealing private information, but don’t solve the problem of making accurate matches. Neustar is stepping into that breach in a deal to make its identity resolution and data enrichment available within the InfoSum data clean room. InfoSum also announced a deal recently to enrich data clean room contents with IRI consumer data.

Subscription management platform Zuora is buying Zephr, which adds marketing and personalization capabilities to subscription services. Subscriptions have become an increasingly popular way to squeeze earn more revenue from customers, although $18 per month heated car seats still seem ridiculous.

Ridiculous is in the eye of the beholder, but facts should not be.  At least, that’s the theory behind NewsGuard, which rates the reliability of news sources.  They just did a deal to make their ratings available to contextual ad targeting platform Semasio, which will let Semasio clients avoid placing ads on unreliable sites.

We haven’t heard much recently about Unified ID 2.0, probably the most widely supported alternative to third-party cookies for ad viewer tracking.  But it’s still growing.  Latest to hop on the bandwagon is ad buying platform MediaMath.  It’s not an exclusive commitment: MediaMath also supports identity solutions from ID5, LiveIntent, LiveRamp, Lotame, Parrable, and others.

Lily AI, which generates product classifications directly from images, has just raised a $25 million Series B.  Lily AI says it measures over 15,000 attributes rather than placing products within standard taxonomies.  Automated classification removes a major obstacle to on-site search, product discovery, recommendations, and demand forecasting.

Unless you happen to sell point of sales systems, this Epicor survey of POS buyers may not seem relevant. But the results are probably similar for other tech products.  Key findings: 73% of buyers consider replacing a system within three years of buying it; 93% prefer a system tailored to their industry; 92% want sales teams that understand their industry; sellers don’t provide enough support during deployment; and data migration is the biggest deployment challenge.

The simplest description of Medallia is “listening platform”, but that sounds creepier than what they actually do, which is to analyze and react to customer and employee conversations.  They were bought by software investor Thoma Bravo last October and have made at least four acquisitions since then, including the Thunderhead journey orchestration engine.  They just closed their deal for callback scheduling vendor Mindful, which was announced in July.