Meta also has a big “trust me” sticker attached to its latest offering, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. Similar to Google’s Performance Max, the service asks marketers to share customer lists, ad materials, campaign targets, and a budget, and then let Meta decide what ads to buy and offers to show. Like Google, Meta will tell advertisers how well it did rather than giving them data to judge for themselves.

One of this year’s most important meta-stories has been regulators’ increasingly effective pushback against seemingly unstoppable tech giants.  We’ve had three examples in the past week, starting with Amazon’s agreement to reduce the advantages it gives to its own products and stop helping itself with data it collects about sales by independent merchants.  Both changes are in response to European Union anti-trust activity and presumably apply only within Europe.

The past year has been tough for all kinds of tech investments.  This LUMA report offers an overview of martech, adtech, and content tech financial activity in public markets, private financing, and mergers and acquisitions.  To summarize a mixed picture: the bleeding has stopped but growth has not yet resumed.