We don’t usually report rumors and this item is a couple of days old. But it’s huge news so I wanted you to see it. The specific item is that, to avert EU anti-trust action, Alphabet may drop its requirement that YouTube ads be placed through its Ad Manager and Google Ads products. What makes it huge is the implication that regulators may finally start to take serious action against Big Tech monopolies.
If you think you spotted a trend of connecting ads with sales results, you’re right. Nielsen is headed in the same direction with its Nielsen ONE Alpha cross-platform measurement solution, which will combine details on ad campaign reach, frequency, and audience characteristics with the advertiser’s sales data. At least, that’s the plan: the features won’t be available in real life until next year at the earliest.
Microsoft is a charter member of the Big Tech club, but testing a retail marketplace within its Bing search engine makes it sound like a scrappy upstart nipping at the ankles of Amazon and Google. The new marketplace will let consumers buy within the search results instead of sending them to retailers’ websites. Details are sketchy but the marketplace may do targeting with information gathered by other Microsoft products – which puts the story back into the “Big Tech exploiting your data” department.
Salesforce’s Dreamforce mega-conference is next week and the company’s publicity elves are already working overtime. In the first of what are sure to be daily announcements this week, the company announced 100+ industry-specific prompts, data models, and AI capabilities across its fifteen industry clouds. It also launched an AI Use Case Library to house its industry-specific AI offerings.