Elon Musk may have pretty much destroyed the value of blue checkmarks at Twitter, but others think they’re worth doing right. The latest convert is Google Gmail, which is offering a blue checkmark on emails from brands that use its BIMI authentication service. Other recent checkmarketeers include Google Ads, LinkedIn, and Meta.
I vaguely recall a satire where ads were inserted at contextually relevant spots in movies, such as a cellphone ad when ET calls home. Wait, that’s the example given to explain an utterly serious announcement last week of a new ad placement option from Roku. “Roku’s artificial intelligence searches the Roku library for iconic plot moments that match a brand’s message and place their ads in real time.” So horrifying it might just work.
Publishers have long complained that search and social media companies share their content without paying for it. Google and Facebook have aggressively opposed such efforts in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. TikTok, on the other hand, just announced a program to let publishers share a reported 50% of revenue from ads near their content.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)