Recast somewhat grandiosely calls itself an “automated marketing data science platform”, although what they really do is marketing mix modeling and related forecasting, planning, and mix optimization. Still, marketers can build models for themselves. That’s kind of fun when the input data is available, which it often is not. They just announced $3.4 million seed funding on top of a $1.1 million pre-seed raise.
TheyDo also collects customer data from all sources, builds profiles, and draws insights from the results. So far as I can tell, they map journeys and measure results but don’t (yet) execute interactions. This puts them roughly in the journey orchestration category, which has been almost empty since major independents Thunderhead, Pointillist, Kitewheel, and Usermind were all bought. TheyDo just raised a €12 million ($12.7 million) Series A.
Lots of international canoodling to report today, Dear Reader. Taiwan-based CDP Appier has integrated Appier’s AI-based predictive capabilities with data analytics and visualization features of US-based Woopra, which Appier bought in September. The new module, AIRIS, will help marketers get a clear picture of customer behaviors and act on the results.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.