Snapchat parent company Snap Inc. has acquired Placed, which tracks the locations of opt-in audience members. Among other services, Placed matches its list with ad audiences provided by marketers to compare the behavior of people who saw an ad to those who didn’t. Price wasn’t disclosed but Geekwire said the deal could be worth more than $200 million.
Customer Data Platform vendor Segment has introduced Cross Domain Analytics, which lets brands track customer activity across their own digital properties by using second party (i.e., shared) cookies. This lets them avoid reliance on third party cookies owned by other companies. Segment notes that second party cookies are less likely to be blocked than third party cookies, providing more complete information. The downside is Cross Domain Analytics won’t track customers across other companies’ properties.
Ad blocking by consumers isn’t a response to fake news, although it does threaten the economics of both legitimate and illegitimate publishers. A study from AdBlock Plus and Global Web Index found that 40% of respondents used an ad blocker in the past month. Ad blocking is likely to increase since it’s more common among younger users, just over half the respondents still don’t know ad blockers are available, of U.S. and mobile ad blocking happens less often in the U.S. (so far) than in Asia.
Enterprise AI vendor Uniphore has acquired CDP ActionIQ and cloud data engineering system Infoworks. The combination of products will create a Zero Data AI Cloud that simplifies AI deployments by enabling companies to access data for AI projects without moving it from existing systems. Prices were not announced.