Email is an even more venerable digital medium than web search, and ultimately even more vulnerable to change from AI. In addition to the obvious opportunities for machine-written email, there’s also the prospect of machine-empowered email fraud. South Africa-based Sendmarc just raised a $7 million Series A to help to ensure senders are who they claim.
Search engines began some time ago to switch from listing relevant web links to providing answers within the search results. Generative AI like ChatGPT and Bard will hugely accelerate the transition. This opens new challenges opportunities for search engine optimization vendors. SEO platform Conductor just strengthened its ability to deal with whatever comes next by purchasing European-based competitor Searchmetrics.
Web3 is about as ill-defined as a concept can be, but you could still bet that someone would come up with marketing technology to exploit it. Sure enough, Sesame Labs just raised a $4.5 million seed round for a platform that will combine user profiles, segmentation, messaging, and rewards on Web3 platforms.
It’s tough to get brand safety right, but the industry keeps trying. IPG Mediabrands announced a new set of tools to find and block inappropriate ad placements, while IAS expanded its suitability measurements to include standards from the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). Meanwhile, DoubleVerify admitted a mistake made brand safety on X/Twitter look worse than it really was in October 2023 and March 2024.