At just under six hours per day, traditional TV viewing is far from dead.   Still, this Comcast study reports 21% of advertisers are reducing their linear budgets – far more than social, streaming, or addressable TV.  The bigger news is that 73% of marketers are using addressable TV, 87% are using first party data, and last year saw a 51% increase in audience-based targeting.

No one likes to spend money on “made for advertising” (MFA) sites that have few actual visitors, although the outrage seems stronger among publishers than advertisers, who see the waste as a cost of doing business.  Still, for the advertisers who do care, NewsGuard has just launched a service to let advertisers build lists that exclude MFA sites from their campaigns or build lists of non-MFA sites to include.  

Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents.  You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better.  It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange.  Price was not announced.