Disney is also expanding its data-driven ad business, launching a programmatic exchange for video ads, leveraging its data for cross-channel targeting, and selling combined inventory across Hulu and Disney properties. They’re even promoting their own Disney Audience Graph as a partial replacement for third-party cookies. Isn’t everyone?
In a far different corner of the galaxy, Instacart announced a $265 million financing round for its pandemic-fueled online grocery business. The raise brings total funding to $2.7 billion and values the company at $39 billion. This has more to do with martech than you may think: some of the money will grow Instacart marketplace and advertising services that leverage its massive customer base.
Tighter privacy regulations were supposed to deter companies from sharing their customer data, right? But this Winterberry Group paper gives a mixed message: it reports that 64% of U.S. respondents are collaborating directly others to share their data in a second-party relationship. Yet at least as many are also licensing their data to third parties for targeting and measurement.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)