One reason that AT&T’s direct relationships are important is fear that privacy rules like GDPR will hobble the advertising based on third party relationships. Not yet, according to Digiday: programmatic ad buys are starting to recover after an initial drop when GDPR went into effect last month.
One of the biggest challenges companies face in protecting customer data is just finding where sensitive data sits in their systems. BigID does that, assess risks, and helps to manage resolutions. They just raised a $30 million Series B, bringing total to $46.1 million
For delivering ads you might not want, Adobe has a technical triumph of its own: it has teamed up with online audio distributor TuneIn to serve ads on smart speakers such as Amazon Echo and Google Home. Chosen format is 90 second ads delivered twice an hour. The company says that targeting “at launch” is based on the type of content, perhaps implying that individual-level targeting will follow.
Customer engagement platform Twilio has integrated with OpenAI’s Realtime API to enable Twilio customers and developers to build AI-powered conversational apps. The integration will support the creation of speech-to-speech voice conversations featuring AI agents. This is an expansion of existing Twilio/OpenAI integrations.