There’s definite overlap between retail media and out-of-home advertising, and ads on hired vehicles are a bit of both. Right on cue, here’s a birth announcement for Lyft Media, which will offer ads on top of vehicles, inside of vehicles, within the Lyft app, and even on Lyft-owned bikeshare docks. Ads will be targeted by location, not at individuals, so this leans more towards the out-of-home side.
Are you tired of hearing about retail media networks yet, Dear Reader? I find a wonky fascination in watching players fill each niche as a new industry evolves. Latest is a In-Store Marketplace, which offers “a consistent, ubiquitous, single-point of integration for any in-store Retail Media platform.” Ownership is unclear but it seems to be run by a consortium of retail media agencies aiming to provide unified inventory.
Outbound marketing platform Iterable has launched a new AI Optimization Suite, whose main features are letting non-technical users create custom predictive models and see which inputs drive those models. This sort of thing isn’t quite table stakes but it’s becoming more common. Iterable collects and activates unified customer data in ways that seem CDP-ish, although we haven’t classified them as one…yet.
Unauthorized training data isn’t an existential threat to generative AI but it’s certainly a headache for users and developers alike. Most developers are trying to exclude materials that creators have explicitly labeled as unauthorized and citing “fair use” as justification for copying everything else. Getty Images has taken an opposite approach, building its gen AI tool only on materials that are explicitly licensed. It’s possible that tracing the provenance of training data will become a standard, similar to how organic food producers trace the origins of their ingredients.