MNTN helps direct response advertisers sell on streaming TV networks. They’re on a roll, having just bought Ryan Reynolds’ ad agency Maximum Effort and video creation platform QuickFrame. That all costs money, so their latest acquisition is a pile of 119 million U.S. dollars. The round triples their total funding from a prior total of $64.8 million.
Trackers gonna track: SXM Media, the ad sales arm of SiriusXM, Pandora, and Stitcher, has launched a cooklieless personal identifier to track its listeners. The system collects “a variety of consented listener signals and inputs” to determine which devices belong to the same individual, and uses the resulting “AudioID” for ad targeting and measurement. Initial deployments will be limited to SXM Media’s own properties but the company plans to add audiences on other platforms later this year.
There’s not much novelty left in artificial intelligence or no-code tech, and even the combination is a bit of a yawn. Still CausaLens gets a second look because their $45 million Series A will go to AI using “cause and effect” logic instead of basic correlations and pattern recognition. In case you do want more AI information, here’s a Persado study that finds 54% of companies are already using it to create personalized experiences and all but 7% plan to join them.
With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).