You probably don’t need more convincing that shopping on social media is A Thing, Dear Reader. But I’m still intrigued at how quickly the industry has hopped aboard that bandwagon. So here’s news that Pinterest has just bought THE YES, which uses AI to create a personalized fashion shopping feed based on users’ preferences for brand, style, and size.
The CDP industry is spending a lot of time debating whether IT teams should build their own systems or buy commercial software. Capital One Financial Corp has taken ‘build’ to an extreme by letting other companies buy systems it originally built for itself. The first product offered by Capital One Software is a data management tool for Snowflake. It’s probably not a trend but if it is, you heard it here first.
We all knew the day was coming when humans would be helpers to robots instead of the other way around. Chatbot maker Gupshup has taken that one step closer by purchasing OneDirect, which helps human customer service agents handle the calls that chatbots can’t manage. Gupshup doesn’t position it as humans helping chatbots but they’re not fooling anyone.
It’s tough to get brand safety right, but the industry keeps trying. IPG Mediabrands announced a new set of tools to find and block inappropriate ad placements, while IAS expanded its suitability measurements to include standards from the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). Meanwhile, DoubleVerify admitted a mistake made brand safety on X/Twitter look worse than it really was in October 2023 and March 2024.