It’s been a good week for Google, if not necessarily the rest of us. Fresh from a U.S. court ruling effectively preserving its search money, the company learned that European Union regulators have paused an expected fine for adtech abuses. No reason was given although fear of U.S. retaliation is suspected.
Audience measurement vendor Comscore has launched a new venture to build privacy-safe audiences from privacy-unsafe customer data. The trick is to match IDs from third-party audiences to Comscore’s own consumer panel, and then build a look-alike model using non-personal attributes. The dozen or so partners providing the input audiences include Circana, Dynata, Eyeota, Polk Automotive Solutions, Symphony Health, and TransUnion.
Speaking of monopolists, Amazon wants to capture every purchase possible, even from customers standing in a retail store. To help things along, they’ve enhanced their Lens visual shopping tool with Lens Live, which lets users research a product by pointing at it with their camera. This removes the step of uploading an image. As TechCrunch points out, Google and Pinterest already have similar features.
This deal is about linking ads more directly to shopping results. SPINS is buying a company that sits between where ads run and where purchases happen.