There’s already been plenty of comment on Facebook’s plan to refocus the news feed on personal messages. My take is it’s a clever defensive move to relinquish power over public opinion before national governments grab the company to secure that power for themselves. After all, being nationalized is bad for business and Facebook’s only real purpose is to make money. As it should be.

Most of the news from NRF seemed to be about in-store systems – not especially surprising, but where were artificial intelligence or unified online/offline experience? Instead we have point of sale marketing specialist Ecrebo announcing a new platform to deliver targeted offers at checkout via printed receipts, digital receipts, or customer-facing screens. Ecrebo bases its targeting on a central database that combines transactions and other data from all channels, so it does look a bit like a CDP. Not that I’m obsessed.

Scope3 is expanding into brand safety and fraud detection turf of Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify.  Amazon DSP is the first company to integrate Scope3’s Agentic Media Platform, which eliminates made-for-advertising, fraud, non-brand-safe, and climate-risk inventory by default.  A separate Brand Standards product, built on top of the Agentic Media Platform, lets companies connect with expert AI agents to apply additional content standards.