CDP Institute

API-based communications platform Vonage has expanded its scope by buying conversational commerce tech vendor Jumper.ai.  The acquired firm lets retailers engage with consumers on chat and social channels.  It’s a good illustration of how messaging and ecommerce are increasingly intertwined, if you were looking for one.

Online grocery service Instacart just bought cheerily-named Caper AI, which offers AI-powered in-store shopping cart and checkout technology.  The system uses object recognition to understand what shoppers have placed in their carts, presumably without judging.  It will help both Instacart workers and people buying for themselves – a group that apparently now needs a special label.  I vote for “citizen shoppers”.

TV audience measurement may not be the most fascinating topic ever, but it’s important to some Dear Readers.  Those will be interested to learn that NBCUniversal is organizing a forum to explore new measurement products.  Participants include major trade groups, agencies, and brands.  Motivations include the new TV viewing methods and problems with the once-standard Nielsen ratings service.

This Advertiser Perceptions study gives a little more insight into how TV ad buyers are thinking.  Sure enough, accurate measurement and attribution heads the list of challenges, cited by 57%, followed accurate viewer data (43%) and targeting across linear and connected TV (38%).  Privacy (31%) and ID resolution (29%) rank last.

On the solution side of the fence, TV results measurement vendor iSpot.tv has just purchased DRMetrix.  iSpot.tv uses panels to measure ad impact, while DRMetrix helps direct-to-consumer marketers capture the impact of creative versions and hard-to-track digital program insertion ads.

Ad viewability and brand safety company DoubleVerify has just launched a contextual targeting tool.  The link is DoubleVerify’s semantic classification engine, which categorizes content into based on 200,000 concepts.  The pitch is that better contextual targeting will help companies when third party cookies are no longer available.

Coveo uses AI to classify products and content for on-site search and product recommendations.  They just bought Qubit, which offers similar capabilities with a particular focus on ecommerce.  You could call it a sign of consolidation, but there are still a bajillion other systems doing this sort of thing.

Visiting a different corner of the AI neighborhood, data management platform Alteryx is buying Hyper Anna, which uses AI to generate data-based insights.  The goal is to make it easier for Alteryx clients to gain value from the data that Alteryx assembles.

I swear I was going to give the ‘retail media’ meme a rest, Dear Reader. But then our friends at Lowes tossed their cap into the ring with an announcement of One Roof Media Network. Which also gives me an opportunity to sneak in this notice that food delivery service DoorDash is offering its own ad program. They’re everywhere, I tell you.

If you think about it more than one should, mobile app advertising is also a type of retail network. Which brings us to a pair of acquisitions: App business platform IronSource is buying mobile app monetization platform Tapjoy for $400 million, and mobile marketing platform InMobi is buying app analytics vendor Appsumer. You may recall it was just last week that AppLovin bought MoPub (something we reported backwards, it pains me to admit).

Enough trend-spotting; after all, it’s Friday.  Here’s some weekend fun: take this free data maturity benchmark assessment from MMA Global.  Wheee!

Acxiom has partnered with Adobe to make its Real Identity service available within Adobe Experience Platform.   Real Identity provides the technology to build private identity graphs with a company’s own data.  That’s different from connecting to identity graphs based on third party data.