Sending loud signals that its ambitions exceed delivering your dinner, DoorDash has spent $175 million to buy retail media platform Symbiosys to boost its off-site advertising capabilities. Advertisers, from enterprise CPG leaders to local restaurants, utilize DoorDash in an attempt to reach high intent customers. That reach will now be expanded across search, social, and off-site display.
In another example of a global advertising agency bringing tech inhouse, PMG has acquired retail media platform Momentum Commerce. Integrating Momentum with PMG’s Alli platform (AI-powered analytics) will allow signals from the 37 million products and 880,000 brands tracked by Momentum to be translated into media and creative outcomes. The acquisition follows a long history of partnership between the two entities.
There’s no shortage of lawsuits by publishers against genAI platforms for copyright infringement; now major studios are getting with the program. Walt Disney and Comcast’s Universal are accusing Midjourney of using some of their best known characters (think Darth Vader and the Minions) in its AI image generator — a “bottomless pit of plagiarism,” they say. No response yet from Midjourney.
The web search tool Perplexity looks like it’s taking on Google with its latest release, a web browser named Comet. Comet claims to move “from browsing to thinking,” surfacing information and search results in response to natural language queries. Comet is available immediately to Perplexity Max subscribers; others can join a wait list.