The ad world is aflutter at this Adlytics report that advertisers have been misled for years by Google, which claimed falsely that in-stream video ads served by its TrueView product were unskippable. Google denies the charge. Don’t confuse this scandal with last week’s report that 90% of ads on junk websites are placed by Google Ads, also in violation of stated policy.
We somehow got confused over what day the U.S. celebrates the Fourth of July. Since we didn’t publish yesterday in honor of the holiday, we’ll publish today. Let’s start with this $1.3 billion funding for Inflection AI, which offers what it calls a “personal AI”. It’s not clear how that differs from other AIs, which also learn about their users, but they now have lots of money to explain.
Adtech has clearly seen better times. Pioneering demand-side platform MediaMath files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last Friday, having burned through more than $600 million in financing and leaving over $100 million in debts. More than 300 people have lost their jobs.
Retail and hospitality customer engagement platform Givex has added the ability to create comprehensive customer profiles that include interaction data from other systems. The new product, GivexEngageAI, also develops customer segments, executes marketing campaigns, and recommends next best actions. The company refers to it as a CDP and it does appear to tick all of our boxes.