Back in October, the world was briefly fascinated at the ability of Google NotebookLM to create human-sounding podcasts. The excitement has died down but here’s news that NotebookLM is being used by Spotify Wrapped to generate a personalized podcast summary of each user’s music consumption over the previous year. The new experience will dive deep into listening history, even looking at the inspirations behind users’ favorite tracks.
Google is facing another antitrust lawsuit, this time in Canada, specifically focusing on anti-competitive practices in online advertising. The Competition Tribunal has been asked to order Google to sell two of its ad tech tools, prohibit future anti-competitive practices and fine the company billions of dollars. In response, Google points to a highly competitive market offering plenty of alternatives.
An upbeat report from Dataiku and Databricks has more than half of respondents boasting a dedicated AI team while 65% say they are seeing positive ROI on genAI. The epic “Martech for 2025” (Brinker and Riemersma) details the big impact AI will have on the martech stack, not least because AI agents will join developers in creating new tools. CapitalOne says that, while 87% of a sample including business leaders are confident in their company’s AI capabilities, only a third of tech people thought the company had the needed skills.
Changes in marketing channels and data access have made advertising measurement more important, and challenging, than ever. Taking advantage of growing interest in the topic, Bain Capital is selling Kantar Group’s audience measurement division, Kantar Media, to global investment firm H.I.G. Capital for “approximately $1 billion”. Kantar Media accounts for 4,500 of Kantar Group’s 25,000 employees.