Here’s a reminder of how many ways advertisers can find you: Xiaomi, which calls itself the world’s second-largest smartphone maker although this report places them sixth, has created a direct integration with The Trade Desk to sell ads on Xiaomi’s proprietary mobile ecosystem. You knew your smartphone maker sold ads, right?
Merkle has set up so many partnerships for its Merkury identity resolution platform that it would probably be news if they stopped. But they haven’t: last week, they announced an integration that will let advertisers select audiences in Merkury and execute them through TransUnion’s TruAudience connected TV (CTV) publishing partners. The week before, Merkle announced advertisers will be able to buy Merkury audiences through the OpenX publisher inventory across display, mobile, and CTV.
Industry-specific CDPs are a trend and so are CDPs integrated with operational systems like ecommerce. So here’s a two-fer: restaurant-focused customer engagement and CDP vendor Wisely was just bought by on-demand restaurant commerce platform Olo. Price was $77 million in case and about $110 million in Olo stock.
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.