It seems that Walmart and Mai both have the right idea. Poor targeting and escaping the walled gardens are digital marketers’ top two concerns, according to this Criteo survey. Also download to learn whether consumers worry most about fake news, privacy, or online scams.
Does the entire notion of ad targeting strike you as a bit retro? Mai (formerly Markable.AI) thinks people should just point at anything they see on a screen and buy it. They’ve added $5 million to their Series A to build AI-based image and video content recognition tech to make it happen.
Google and Facebook both stand to lose revenue from the Apple changes. Facebook has been characteristically obnoxious, making dubious anti-trust threats and cluelessly expecting sympathy that it may lose some revenue. Google has been more passively aggressive, delaying app updates that would require new labels and saying it will stop trying to collect the data even though (pause to wipe small tear from eye) the “vibrant and open app ecosystem” will suffer as a result.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)