Adtech
It’s been over two years since a key piece of the tracking-ads’ industry’s consent collection apparatus was found to breach European Union’s data protection laws. Today the surveillance data complex…
Vibe helps small companies buy video ads on streaming services
As streaming apps and services are gradually showing more ads to viewers, adtech startup Vibe plans to help small businesses take advantage of that trend by letting them access that…
Google sees augmented reality (AR) as a new, potentially quite effective advertising medium. Today, the search giant announced the launch of AR Beauty ads, a new smartphone ad type that…
ByteDance’s video editor CapCut targets businesses with AI ad scripts and AI-generated presenters
CapCut, the ByteDance-owned video editing app that’s the company’s second to hit $100 million in consumer spending after TikTok, is now expanding into business tools. Known today for its easy-to-use…
TikTok scores sizable Disney deal including a content hub and publisher partnership
TikTok has landed Disney as its latest big-name publishing partner for its premium ad product, Pulse Premiere, announced earlier this year. The company will join other large publishers, including NBCU,…
Spotify’s new Showcase tool lets artists pay to promote their music in the Home feed
Spotify this week launched a new tool called Showcase that allows artists to promote their work directly in the streaming app’s revamped Home feed introduced earlier this year. With Showcase,…
Google’s adtech targeted by Dutch class-action style privacy damages suit
Google is facing class-action style litigation in the Netherlands which accuses the adtech giant of breaching European privacy laws. It’s demanding Google stops tracking and profiling consumers and is also…
X, formerly Twitter, caught running unlabeled ads in users’ Following feeds
X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has been caught running unlabeled ads in users’ Following feeds, TechCrunch has learned and was able to confirm firsthand. While scrolling the Following…
TikTok now lets brands buy ads that appear in the app’s search results
TikTok announced today it’s adding a new place for advertisers to reach its audience: within the search results page. The new ad buying type dubbed the “Search Ads Toggle” will…
X says it has “delivered a decade’s worth of innovation focused on creating an engaging and healthy environment” since Elon Musk’s acquisition. Sure! Everyone knows that when you think about…
Meta expects recommendation models ‘orders of magnitude’ bigger than GPT-4. Why?
Meta made a remarkable claim in an announcement published today intended to give more clarity on its content recommendation algorithms. It’s preparing for behavior analysis systems “orders of magnitude” bigger…
Featured Article
Adtech giant Criteo hit with revised €40M fine by French data privacy body over GDPR breaches
French advertising technology giant Criteo has been issued with a revised fine of €40 million ($44 million) over failings to garner users’ consent around targeted advertising. The case in question dates back to 2018 when Privacy International filed a formal complaint with the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL), France’s data privacy watchdog, using…
AI chatbots have only just been put into consumers’ hands, but tech giants are rushing to monetize them. For instance, shortly after Bing Chat’s arrival, Microsoft began slipping ads into…
Snap announces tests of sponsored links in My AI, new ad products for Spotlight and Stories
After Snap’s stock took a hit from its weak first-quarter earnings, the company today made its pitch to advertisers at IAB’s NewFronts where it introduced new ad products and opportunities.…
Roku partners with Best Buy and its advertising business to get first-party shopper data
Roku and Best Buy announced today that as part of their new first-to-market partnership, Roku gets access to Best Buy’s advertising platform. Also, Best Buy customers have exclusive access to…
Breef, a platform that allows brands to manage and service marketing agency projects, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series A round (an undisclosed portion of which…
Banzai, a marketing tech startup, acquires Hyros for $110M, raises $100M and goes public via a $580M SPAC
The IPO window is all but closed right now, but a few things appear still to be getting through the cracks and there are big sums attached to that. Today,…
Adtech antitrust class damages claim filed against Google in UK — seeking up to $16.3BN
Litigation against Google and its parent entity Alphabet being brought in the U.K. on behalf of thousands of digital publishers — seeking up to £13.6 billion (~$16.3 billion) in damages…
AI content platform Jasper raises $125M at a $1.5B valuation
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Jasper’s valuation is $1.7 billion. It’s $1.5 billion; we regret the error. As the enthusiasm around AI image and text generators…
Rephrase.ai lands fresh investment to grow its synthetic media platform
Rephrase.ai, a self-described synthetic media production platform, today announced that it raised $10.6 million in a Series A round led by Red Ventures with participation from Silver Lake and 8VC.…
Amazon wants Alexa owners to buy more things. That’s the clear impetus behind the new Alexa feature announced today at Amazon’s Accelerate conference, called Customers Ask Alexa, which lets brands…
Google’s adtech practices targeted in UK, EU antitrust damages suits
More antitrust litigation targeting Big (ad)Tech: Google is being sued in the U.K. and the Netherlands where two suits have been announced today seeking damages on behalf of publishers who…
Falkon closes $16M round to automate sales workflows and analyses
Falkon, a sales analytics platform that uses AI to attempt to show where successful product sales are occuring in an organization, today announced that it raised $16 million in a…
Hold-outs targeted in fresh batch of noyb GDPR cookie consent complaints
Just over a year after launching a major project targeting thousands of sites blatantly flouting cookie tracking rules in Europe, regional privacy campaign group noyb has fired off another batch…
Adtech giant Criteo faces $65M fine in France for GDPR consent breaches
In the latest blow to the creepy ‘tracking-ads’ complex, French adtech giant Criteo has been found in breach of European Union data protection regulation and hit with a €60 million…
DuckDuckGo removes carve-out for Microsoft tracking scripts after securing policy change
A few months on from a tracking controversy hitting privacy-centric search veteran, DuckDuckGo, the company has announced it’s been able to amend terms with Microsoft, its search syndication partner, that…
Why investors see the potential in AI-powered, copy-generating adtech companies
Sophisticated AI systems like OpenAI’s GPT-3 can write prose that’s impressively human-like, or at least good enough to fool the average person. They’ve been used to generate essays, poetry, stories,…
Netflix partners with Microsoft for its ad-supported plan
It looks like things are coming together for Netflix’s lower-priced ad-supported tier, reported to arrive later this year: Netflix just revealed today that it’s partnering with Microsoft as its “global…
Uh oh! European carriers are trying to get into ‘personalized’ ad targeting
As Google works on reconfiguring its adtech stack to move away from cookie-based ad targeting to something else that’s not yet fixed but which it claims will be better for…
Google and Meta closing ads in Russia helped Putin, argues Navalny
Jailed Kremlin critic, Alexey Navalny, has hit out at adtech giants Meta and Google for shutting off advertising inside Russia following the country’s invasion of Ukraine which he argues has…
