Organizational note: we’ve assigned “Facebook is evil” news to our Department of the Obvious, which in hindsight is where it belongs. Department Intern Jamie has already found two suitably obvious items: Facebook’s fact checking operation is ineffective and letting users clear their behavior history could make Facebook ad targeting less effective. More to come, for sure.
Walmart has been doing all sorts interesting things to counter the advances of Amazon. Here’s the latest: purchase of natural language processing specialist Aspectiva, which analyzes customer reviews and uses the result to fine-tune ecommerce search results. The result is higher conversion rates.
Bored with display ads? Podcasting is arguably the hottest new medium right now, although voice and video advocates might differ. That would be a fun mud-wrestling match but I digress. Voxnest has just launched what it says is the first marketplace for in-audio advertising inventory, making it easier to purchase large, demographically-targeted podcast audiences. No individually-targeted ads here. Yet.
T-Mobile will acquire out-of-home adtech business Vistar Media for $600 million. Vistar Media is managing advertising campaigns across over one million digital screens. Its capabilities will combine with T-Mobile’s customer insights and data and its extensive in-store retail media network.