Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.
Over 60% of Connected TV advertisers expect to increase spending on the channel according to a study conducted by TV ad solution Premion with research firm Advertising Perceptions. The outlook sees spending rise by 21% on average. Thirty-six percent believe CTV advertising is more effective than traditional TV while just 17% says it’s worth less.
Data activation and customer engagement platform MessageGears has announced enhancements that will enable it to extract insights into customer behavior and campaign performance direct from enterprise data warehouses. This will give marketing organizations no-code access to the insights without the need for analytics assistance. MessageGears is also introducing predictive segmentation and analytics on contributions to growth by channel.
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.