Shoppable ads are a big trend I’ve noticed but not covered because the announcements are so narrowly product-specific. Kenshoo has come to my rescue with its quarterly report on digital advertising, which highlights over-all growth in product-specific shopping ads (up 87% to 100% year-on-year) despite the over-all slowdown in paid social (down 13%) and paid search (down 9%). Thanks, Kenshoo!
There are so many companies offering cookie-free identification solutions that I may just stop treating their announcements as news. But for now let’s report that Neustar has launched Fabrik, a unified identity “ecosystem” drawing on Neustart’s proprietary huge cache of cross-channel customer identity matches. So long as you have one personal identifier, Neustar can connect that with other IDs for the same individual. Applications include individual-level targeting, personalization, data enrichment, and media measurement.
No-code data connectors are easy compared with getting a computer to understand sales conversations. That’s what Chorus.ai does, going beyond transcription to writing summaries and pulling out highlights. They just raised a $45 million Series C, making their total $85 million.
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.