Continuing its steady product expansion, self-described “composable” CDP Hightouch has launched a solution to empower CTV advertisers. The solution will help target, match, and measure first-party audiences across the CTV landscape of DSPs, OEM platforms, and measurement tools. It supports programmatic and direct activation and enhances first-party audiences with third-party data licensed by Hightouch.
M&A initiatives in the martech space increased to 33 in Q3, 2024, an increase of 38% on Q2 according to stack management platform CabinetM. New product releases were down from Q1 and Q2, although those quarters saw a lot of AI-related announcements. Similarly, investment looks way down from over $10 billion in Q2 to $1.5 billion in Q3, but the Q2 figures were skewed by a couple of massive AI investments.
AI model builders now have one less excuse for not paying publishers to use their data: TollBit has launched a marketplace that makes it easy to license publisher content. The system, which has already onboarded 200 publisher websites, also monitors for data collection bot traffic. TollBit just raised a $24 million Series A, bringing total funding to $31 million.
A U.S. district court judge has ruled that Google acted to create illegal monopolies in online advertising technology in a way that blocked competition and allowed higher ad prices to be charged. Google will appeal; meantime, the government will decide what to ask the court to do to remedy the monopoly. Google also faces a new U.K. antitrust lawsuit over its dominance of search.