CDP Institute

T-Mobile will acquire out-of-home adtech business Vistar Media for $600 million. Vistar Media is managing advertising campaigns across over one million digital screens. Its capabilities will combine with T-Mobile’s customer insights and data and its extensive in-store retail media network.

Contextual intelligence platform Precise TV has secured $26 million in private equity funding from Lloyds Bank-owned PE investor LDC. Precise TV helps brands plan campaigns for CTV, social video and mobile games. It’s the London-based companies first receipt of PE funding.

Q4 2024 was the fourth consecutive quarter of increased deal activity in the digital Ecosystem according to a full year report by Luma Partners. Large strategic deals in the closing months of 2024 signalled optimism for 2025. Full year deal volume was up 13% on 2023 for digital content and MarTech and notably for adtech (up 73%).

Treasure Data will provide its system to free for companies that are stuck in contracts with other CDPs. The trade-up program is available to companies with roughly firms with $1 billion or more revenue, that already have a competitive CDP in place. There will still be some costs for services to make the conversion but Treasure Data says these are fairly small since it has considerable experience with such projects.

European DXP Ibexa has announced a strategic merger with CDP Raptor (both companies are owned by the QNTM Group). Raptor will complement Ibexa’s existing content and commerce capabilities, supporting data-driven personalization. It’s not an acquisition but still illustrates the trend towards merging CDP and DXP capabilities in a single system.

Craven pandering to right-wing overlords or enthusiastically doing what they always really wanted?  Either way, Meta has loudly proclaimed the end of efforts to support diversity among users, employees, and suppliers, while Amazon has moved more subtly in the same direction.  In other oligarch news, Elon Musk plans to add more defendants in his lawsuit to force advertisers to pay money to X.

CDP Hightouch, in partnership with Databricks, is launching an AI-powered, self-service audience management platform for offsite retail media networks. It will enable retailers to build and activate AI-generated audiences across a range of media channels—including DSPs, CTV platforms, and walled gardens. The audience builder is warehouse-native.

In what might be a game-changer in the retail media space, Amazon is offering a Retail Ad Service to multi-brand retailers in the U.S. with ecommerce sites or apps. Essentially, this allows retailers to become their own retail media networks, delivering relevant ads to their shoppers across browse, search and product pages. You don’t even need to sell on Amazon to use it.

Coming out of NRF 2025, product announcements from SAP including a new solution for customer loyalty management. Features include connecting shopper profiles with a cloud-based loyalty wallet and unified loyalty data across multiple brands and regions. It will also add an AI shopping assistant to SAP Commerce Cloud.

Amazon advertisers can now measure results outside of Amazon stores using a new service from Stackline and Gigi. Gigi will enable unified audience buying for Amazon Marketing Cloud and Amazon DSP, which run ads in Amazon’s online stores and streaming TV channels such as Prime Video.  Stackline’s panel-based multi-retailer attribution will track customer behavior across Amazon, Walmart, Target, and other major online or in-store retailers.

Livestream auction platform Whatnot has raised $265 million in Series E funding at a nearly $5 billion valuation. Whatnot is seen as a competitor to TikTok Shop. It’s not just in the creator space that people will look for alternatives should TikTok be banned in the U.S.

For the first time, data vendor Experian is offering a marketplace for third-party data vendors. Initial participants include Attain, Circana, Dun & Bradstreet and Alliant. This follows Experian’s introduction of third-party onboarding last year shortly before Oracle exited that space.