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.

YouTube is not just a video platform, of course, it’s also a powerful search engine and it has begun testing a Google AI Overviews carousel that will appear in results for selected queries. Given the threat AI Overviews is perceived to pose to click-thru traffic in Google Search results, there’s a question about whether the YouTube initiative could depress click-thrus to brand and creator videos. Right now, the feature is only visible to a sub-set of U.S. premium users.