And speaking of privacy, Google Cloud plans a set of Confidential Computing services which will protect all kinds of data, not just customer identities. They just announced the beta version of the first product, Confidential VMs, which will use special hardware to encrypt data while it’s being processed. Traditionally, data had to be decrypted during processing, which gave bad guys a chance to steal it.
Zeotap assembles first-party data in a CDP, enhances it with its own third-party data, and pushes audiences to ad platforms. They call themselves a “customer intelligence platform” which is as good a label as any, I guess. They just raised a $42 million Series C, bringing total funding to $63 million.
Video platform TikTok has been in the news recently for everything from trolling politicians to spying on users. But that’s all a distraction from what really matters, which is selling ads. They just launched a self-service ad buying platform and $100 million in ad credits to help small businesses do just that.
Digital advertising platform PubMatic’s new partnership with GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, will enable the delivery of AI-powered cohort modeling to advertisers. Using a distributed AI model developed by Resolve, the collaboration aims to generate privacy-compliant audience segments across multiple publishers simultaneously. Not only does the targeting not rely on third party cookies, it also eradicates the need for user data to be moved or shared during the ad buying process.