If you’ve been waiting for Google to enter martech, your wait is over. Google Cloud has launched a collection of retail solutions ranging from store operations to merchandising to customer acquisition and retention. Google also announced retail-related partnerships with system integrators and software firms including Bluecore, Salesforce, SAP, and Tableau.
LiveRamp’s business is built on tracking consumers across platforms, so it makes sense in a fox-guarding-the-chickens sort of way for them to be in the business of preserving privacy as well. They’ve just bought Faktor, an Amsterdam-based consent management platform that will become part of their suite of privacy compliance tools.
Wrapping up an atypically cheerful sequence, major advertising organizations have launched a “Privacy for America” coalition that will lobby for surprisingly reasonable of principles to improve consumer privacy protections. You can argue that they’re only trying to forestall more stringent state legislation and if you’re really cynical you can say they’re trying to hobble Facebook, Google and other data collectors. But it’s a beautiful spring day so let’s just see it as a step in the right direction.
“Ask Meta AI anything” is what you now see instead of the traditional search bar across Meta apps such as Facebook and Instagram. Meta AI will still perform the basic search function but will also answer questions and chat with you. It should hardly be a surprise when a tech company launches a genAI solution these days but this is a bold challenge to Google and Open.ai (it’s also available as a standalone tool at Meta.ai).