Canadian marketing solutions vendor Wishpond has acquired London-based referral collection system Viral Loops for US$2.3 million. It’s Wishpond’s fifth acquisition since going public in 2020. The company is pulling together components of a small business marketing suite.
Milan-based CDP and marketing agency Contactlab has been purchased by Growens, a global martech company whose other holdings include messaging system MailUp (Italy), CDP Datatrics (The Netherlands), no-code content builder BEE (U.S.) and email provider Acumbamail (Spain). The cash, stock, and earn-out deal is valued up to €6.5 million ($7.2 million).
Here’s a surprise: European Union anti-trust regulators are attacking a tech giant that isn’t Google, Facebook, or Amazon. The regulators are studying whether Microsoft’s cloud service business has continued anti-competitive practices that earned it €1.6 billion ($1.8 billion) in fines in the past, or maybe has found some new ones.
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.