OwnerIQ, which helps companies share their own (first party) customer data with each other – thereby creating second party data – has closed $6 million in funding and may take more. The company makes it easier for clients to create and deploy second party data to better target digital advertising.
SAP announced acquisition of Abakus, which uses a “patented game theory-based attribution technology” to estimate the incremental impact of marketing efforts. It will be part of SAP’s Hybris Marketing Cloud, which already builds a single customer view and executes omnichannel marketing programs. Attribution has been a hot topic recently: you’ll recall we wrote about Visual IQ on 12/13 and Proof on 12/6.
Visual IQ ingests Web and offline audiences, builds individual-level contact histories, and uses them for marketing attribution and media optimization. It announced that four marketing agencies (360i, KBS, MullenLowe Mediahub and The Media Kitchen) have become its first certified alliance partners. The system can generate optimized media plans but not individual-level segments.
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.