CDP Institute

Content recommendation vendor Taboola has purchased ecommerce product recommendation vendor Connexity (formerly Shopzilla) for around $800 million. Both firms embed their suggestions in publisher websites. You may recall that Taboola went public via a SPAC a few weeks ago.

Maybe you’re rather make your own ecommerce product recommendations.  Personalization engine Qubit is on the case, with a new system that bases its recommendations on “deep learning”, which they assure us is much, much better than mere “machine learning”.  No word on whether there’s a dial that goes to 11.

Here’s a sign of the times: Salesforce has confirmed it is no longer selling its Audience Studio DMP, which started as its $700 million Krux acquisition in 2016.  Current users will be supported but the company expects third-party audiences to be loaded into its CDP in the future, and first-party audiences to be pushed to Facebook, Google, Amazon and other closed ad platforms via Advertising Studio.

How often do you find yourself saying, I wish I had more apps to talk to?  Apparently, often enough that the folks at Native Voice have just raised $14 million for an app that listens for you to call other apps, and wakes them when summoned.  It’s a dream come true, if your dream happens to be The Brave Little Toaster.

Privacy-focused browser Brave has also been listening to consumers, with their permission of course.  They found that 70% of survey respondents find it creepy when they see online ads related to previous Web searches, and 81% would reward brands that gave them more control over how many ads they see.  Brave also ran a test that found ads served in an opt-in environment had a positive impact, but I didn’t see results compared with ads in a conventional environment.  

I could fill this whole issue with news about Out of Home (OOH) advertising, but won’t.  (You’re welcome.)  However, I will report that OOH supply side platform Place Exchange has just left its home at OOH publisher Intersection, packing its bindle with $20 million in venture funding.  I’ll also sneak in that CUENDE is launching its satellite-image-based traffic measurement system in the U.S., and that Comscore has just signed the GSTV (Gas Station TV) fuel pump network for its own place-based audience measurement product.

This PwC Global Entertainment & Media Outlook report lists OOH as one of the fastest growing ad channels, along with tons of other data on advertising segments, projected growth, and trends.  Like other analysts, they’re projecting a strong recovery for advertising after last year’s unprecedented contractions.  Lots here for free although you’d have to pay $3,300 for full access.

I have a special fondness for headless technologies, mostly because they remind me of the famous New York Post headline.  So I’m tickled to share that headless commerce platform Fabric has raised a $100 million Series B, just five months after a $43 million Series A.  This thing has legs.

Despite more hand-wringing than bell-playing octopus quartet, Ad Theorent reports that just 13% of marketers say their company is “very well prepared” for the impact of privacy regulations on their programmatic ad buying.  The most popular solutions are capturing more first-party data (53%) and contextual targeting (49%) – even though only 5% say contextual targeting leads to success.  If you’re keeping score: 11% are running programmatic on a CDP, compared with 18% on a DMP and 69% on a DSP.

Speaking of programmatic, this study from Xaxis and Catalyst finds that more than half of marketers are using programmatic buys for non-traditional channels including audio (59%), Out of Home (57%) and in-game advertising (56%).  Measurement is the biggest obstacle to using new channels while siloed organizations and disconnected technology are tied as the top barriers to integrated advertising and marketing techniques.

RedPoint Global has launched an in-place data quality service, In Situ, which will let clients clean, match, and govern their data without sending it to an outside service.  The trick is to run the system within the client’s virtual private cloud.  A control panel lets business users do most of the work for themselves.

Yelp doesn’t rely on surveillance-based advertising, but they’d like to change that. They have launched a program to target ads at Yelp visitors on non-Yelp platforms based on their Yelp activities. Yelp will serve the ads, so there’s not enough data sharing to break most privacy rules. Consumers may not agree: this recent Jebbit study found 53% of people object to personalized emails based on data they haven’t knowingly shared.