It’s acquisitions all the way down today, Dear Reader. GumGum, which applies computer vision and natural language processing to analyze online content for contextual ad targeting, has purchased Australia-based Playground xyz, which uses eye-tracking technology to measure how much time people spend looking at ads. I guess there are still humans involved somewhere.
Connecting social media measurement with traditional media measurement is yet another trend worth watching. Comscore is on it: they just bought Shareablee, which uses a proprietary taxonomy to classify videos, images, and articles across major social media platforms. Comscore will integrate Shareablee’s social audience insights with its existing media measurement tools.
Spotify just bought Whooshkaa, another Australian firm. They have a platform that converts audio content like radio broadcasts into on-demand podcasts, handling everything from hosting to promotion to monetization to measurement. It’s part of Spotify’s on-going push into the podcast industry.
GrowthLoop will use TransUnion identity data to improve U.S. consumer match rates on client files sent to advertising media such as Facebook and Google Ads. The data should also help clients to find matches among records within their files, building more accurate customer profiles. GrowthLoop calls itself a “composable CDP”, meaning it works with data assembled in external data warehouses.