Now that Zoom meetings are part of almost everyone’s life, you may care what Zoom the company is up to. Which is, they just bought message encryption vendor Keybase and will start offering end-to-end encryption on paid accounts. They also made promised not to listen in on customer meetings or to enable decryption by government agencies, in case you thought they might.
Media buying agency Horizon Media is partnering with TransUnion to identify consumers across channels for ad targeting and analysis. It’s one more example of preparing to execute “people-based” marketing programs after third party cookies are just a delicious memory.
Finally, UK ad trade group ISBA and PwC have conclusively proven that adtech is a hot mess. After two years of work, PwC media experts and data scientists could only map 12% of 267 programmatic million impressions from advertisers to publishers and couldn’t account for 15% of total spend. They did find that publishers receive just half the money paid by advertisers. Brilliantly illustrating the obvious, they conclude “this supply chain complexity seems unlikely to be consistently in the best interests of market participants.”
There’s no shortage of lawsuits by publishers against genAI platforms for copyright infringement; now major studios are getting with the program. Walt Disney and Comcast’s Universal are accusing Midjourney of using some of their best known characters (think Darth Vader and the Minions) in its AI image generator — a “bottomless pit of plagiarism,” they say. No response yet from Midjourney.