Publicis Groupe has purchased CitrusAd, a platform that places ads on ecommerce websites, in physical stores, and in email. It will be a standalone business within Publicis’ Epsilon group. If this sounds familiar, you may be remembering that Dentsu bought ecommerce agency LiveArea for its Merkle unit just two weeks ago.
Xtremepush started as a messaging system but is now one of the companies hoping to sell you a unified digital engagement platform. Yes, it includes a CDP. They just raised $33 million to double their workforce and accelerate their global expansion.
It’s been a Lucy-in-the-chocolate-factory week with more news than I can handle. We have two items from ZoomInfo alone: a direct integration to make their data available within Microsoft Dynamics 365, and a $575 million purchase of Chorus.ai, an AI-driven conversation analysis and sales coaching tool.
“Ask Meta AI anything” is what you now see instead of the traditional search bar across Meta apps such as Facebook and Instagram. Meta AI will still perform the basic search function but will also answer questions and chat with you. It should hardly be a surprise when a tech company launches a genAI solution these days but this is a bold challenge to Google and Open.ai (it’s also available as a standalone tool at Meta.ai).