SheerID calls itself an “identity marketing” vendor, meaning it verifies that people who sign up for offers limited to groups such as students, military, or healthcare workers are really members of those groups. They do this by collecting a ton of data while somehow keeping within privacy rules. In fact, they’re so good at the privacy bit that they’re expanding into 13 European countries, GDPR notwithstanding.
Recommendation engine Bloomreach is buying CDP and marketing automation vendor Exponea. No price was announced. The deal follows similar combinations including Segment/Twilio, Manthan/RichRelevance, CrossEngage/Gpredictive, Agilone/Acquia, and Emarsys/SAP. Bloomreach also announced a $150 million funding.
Of course, the death of third party cookies is the mother of all privacy challenges. Google just released research showing that its favored alternative, which assigns consumers to segments based on their Website visits but doesn’t share individual IDs, gives nearly the same results as cookie-based techniques. Experts are split on whether the approach, called FLoC for reasons that are too complicated to explain, is a meaningful privacy improvement.
Digital advertising platform PubMatic’s new partnership with GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, will enable the delivery of AI-powered cohort modeling to advertisers. Using a distributed AI model developed by Resolve, the collaboration aims to generate privacy-compliant audience segments across multiple publishers simultaneously. Not only does the targeting not rely on third party cookies, it also eradicates the need for user data to be moved or shared during the ad buying process.