Last Friday’s newsletter cited an Adweek article about global consultancies buying ad agencies. Here’s the other side of that coin: an Adweek piece on ad agencies building out their consultancy practices. The grand point being, that technology and marketing are becoming indistinguishably intertwined. You probably knew that.

Online/offline identity matcher LiveRamp also adds new partners all the time.  But its deal with Data Management Platform (DMP) vendor Lotame shows Lotame expanding beyond traditional DMP territory (anonymous profiles for ad audiences) to profiling known individuals across online and offline channels. That’s CDP turf.  Lots of DMPs are doing this. Free advice to buyers: ask pointed questions about how DMP technology supports a use case so different from its original purpose.

Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.