Audio streaming service Spotify has acquired Megaphone, which inserts ads into podcasts. Spotify could do that already but Megaphone offers more precise audience data, enabling more precise targeting. Price was $235 million.
Data aggregator and CDP vendor Zeotap has added $18.5 million to its Series C funding, bringing the Series C to $60.5 million and total funding to $81 million. Zeotap is among the many vendors offering a universal identifier to help replace third-party cookies.
And here’s one more puzzle: a majority of consumers in this Mitel survey reported that customer experience has actually improved during the pandemic. The figure was 60% globally and 71% in the U.S. Don’t tell the folks at Snap that chatbots and virtual agents are consumers’ least favorite support channels.
Digital advertising platform PubMatic’s new partnership with GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, will enable the delivery of AI-powered cohort modeling to advertisers. Using a distributed AI model developed by Resolve, the collaboration aims to generate privacy-compliant audience segments across multiple publishers simultaneously. Not only does the targeting not rely on third party cookies, it also eradicates the need for user data to be moved or shared during the ad buying process.