There are plenty of reports on the growth or shrinkage of different ad channels, but I don’t usually bother to share them with you, Dear Reader. Still, news that summertime viewing of live broadcast TV fell 25% since last year seems shocking enough to mention. Viewing will probably increase in the fall with the return of football and basketball, but it’s still a huge shift.
Made for Advertising (MFA) websites – auto-generated, low quality content that exists just to host advertising – have emerged as this summer’s favorite object of hand-wringing in some advertising circles. If that’s what’s been keeping you up nights, you’ll be happy to hear that media buying agency GroupM is banning them from its inclusion lists, using Jounce Media’s MFA blacklist. Now you can go back to worrying about shark attacks.
Twilio is kicking off its SIGNALS conference, which means we get a bouquet of product announcements. Most relevant here is their hop onto the external data access bandwagon, with Zero Copy Architecture enabling direct access to data warehouse contents. Other new features include generative AI-built customer journeys and support for new entities such as business accounts, subscriptions, and products.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.