Adtech vendors keep trying to profit from industry turmoil. Ad inventory marketplace Adfresco is a good example: trading on concerns about fully-automated ad buying, they now position their service as “bringing the human aspect back to automated buying and selling”. In concrete terms, this means that publishers can post inventory options online with a link to an account executive or sales team that must be contacted to make an actual purchase. Charmingly retro. I wonder if they offer drone-based martini delivery.

And still more about people-based marketing: Heap has technology that captures Web site behaviors without setting up tracking for each event individually. As the company puts it, they “automate away the annoying parts of analytics” so people can focus on the fun stuff. Behaviors can be tied to individuals, which isn’t always the case with Web analytics. The company just raised $27 million, for total funding of $40.2 million.

The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.