The Trade Desk (NASDAQ: TTD) has developed Ventura, an innovative new streaming TV operating system (OS). The Trade Desk will partner with smart TV original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and other streaming TV aggregators to deploy Ventura. The Ventura system represents a major advance in streaming TV operating systems as it solves key issues with prevailing market systems today, including frustrating user experiences, inefficient advertising supply chains, and content conflicts-of-interest. The major benefits of Ventura include a more intuitive, engaging user experience, including: cross-platform content discovery, personalization, subscription management, and ultimately fewer (more relevant) ads; a much cleaner supply chain for streaming TV advertising; the ability to value and price ad impressions across all streaming platforms more accurately, while finding relevant audiences with greater precision. The Trade Desk expects that Ventura will be deployed by OEMs and other streaming TV aggregators as early as 2025. Ventura is already generating widespread industry support:
Intent-driven planning and targeting specialist Nano has announced that it has reached more than 60 Intent Personas on its proprietary LIIFT™ platform, detailing the impact so far of this unique product, a year on from launch. In the face of signal loss, Nano’s Intent Personas provides targeted scale for reaching audiences online – powered by machine learning, verified by always up-to-date panel data. And while cookies and other IDs rely on historical data or actions which may no longer be timely, with Intent Personas buyers can reach audiences live and in the moment they express intent. Nano’s own research shows that around 70% of consumers ‘mask’ their data from trackers weekly or more often and more than half (52%) would favour brands who use no personal data at all in targeting.
Adobe has announced a new collaboration with Depop, the community-powered fashion resale marketplace, as part of its ongoing commitment to “Creativity for All.” This union aims to support fashion influencers and micro-entrepreneurs by helping them prepare for the busy holiday season. Through Adobe Express, the quick and easy create-anything app, members of Depop’s Creator Program will gain access to innovative resources that enable them to enhance their business through professional-looking content and designs, positioning them to stand out in the competitive holiday market. One key feature available to Depop Creator Program members, and Adobe Express Premium users more broadly, is a unique range of Depop-inspired templates. These templates are specifically designed to help sellers enhance their content, offering flexible and customisable options that can be adapted to showcase their items and build their brand presence.
Ozone – the digital advertising platform built for brands by publishers – announced a new partnership with Mediahuis Ireland that will see its news and media brands become part of Ozone’s premium audience offering. Mediahuis is Ireland’s go-to source for journalism and news, reaching millions of people every day as the publisher behind some of the island’s most popular national titles, such as the Irish Independent, Belfast Telegraph, Sunday Independent and Sunday World. Their digital portfolio includes Independent.ie, Belfasttelegraph.co.uk and Sundayworld.com. Mediahuis also publishes several weekly regional news titles, such as The Kerryman, The Sligo Champion, The Wexford People, The Wexford People and The Corkman. Adding Mediahuis’ audiences in the Republic of Ireland will bolster the opportunity for brands looking to extend their audience reach.
Dentsu has launched its 2024 CMO Navigator, Media Edition, a study of 1900+ CMOs in 13 countries. The study reveals how CMOs view media’s evolution from pure performance power, to a strategic driver of business growth requiring a highly nuanced approach fit for the fully addressable, shoppable, and accountable algorithmic era. Conducted during August 2024, the study shows that media is undeniably seen as a strategic lever to drive business growth by an overwhelming majority of CMOs with 88% seeing it as very important or critical. They are readying their organizations to seize new opportunities in a world where algorithms increasingly connect culture to commerce, evidenced by priority investment areas aimed at standing out in consumers’ busy feeds. These include increased investments in short-form content (45% agree), social commerce (43% agree) production/ sponsorship of original content (43% agree), influencer marketing (42% agree), and retail media networks (41% agree). 39% said that their biggest priority will be truly understanding use cases, opportunities and risks of AI in 2025.
Research from Yext, Inc. (NYSE: YEXT), a digital presence platform for multi-location brands, has revealed that Google is facing growing competition from changing search habits, as 45% of customers are likely to use and trust an AI tool to find more information about a brand, 51% now use social media and 28% turn to voice assistants. Amid changes to the search landscape and the rise of new platforms, Yext conducted third-party research to better understand customers’ preferences, needs, and pain points when searching for products, services and information about brands. Yext’s report shows that 64% of customers still start their search journey on a traditional search engine, highlighting the continued need for strong search engine visibility. However, customers use an average of 3 tools or channels when looking for information about products or services such as ″Italian restaurant near me″ or ″hotel in New York City” — meaning that most aren’t just “googling it” anymore. The vast majority (94%) of customers look for brand information on websites other than Google, Bing, Facebook, and Apple, and among Gen Z, 71% choose Instagram and 66% go to TikTok. The research shows that AI’s rise influences the traditional search space too, as 49% of respondents reported that they are likely to trust an AI-generated response on a search engine, such as Google’s AI overviews.
AI integration platform Eden AI has announced a €3 million seed round led by Galion.exe, with participation from 50 Partners and several prominent business angels including Olivier Pomel (Co-Founder of Datadog), Sébastien Pahl (Co-Founder of Docker) and Alix de Sagazan (Co-Founder of ABTasty). Eden AI will use the funding to accelerate product development, grow its engineering team, and expand its partner ecosystem. Eden AI’s comprehensive end-to-end platform enables businesses to access over 70 AI technologies and 100 AI models from providers including Google, AWS and OpenAI. It addresses the difficulty businesses encounter when trying to leverage AI within their organisations. Through its user-friendly interface, Eden AI enables businesses that lack the expertise, resources and integration know-how to translate complex AI models into intuitive tools to address their unique business needs. Users can easily build complex AI workflows, monitor costs, and manage AI solutions. By combining cutting-edge AI with practical tools for deployment and monitoring, Eden AI offers a unique proposition that simplifies the AI integration process.
SailPoint Technologies, Inc., a leader in unified identity security for enterprises, has unveiled its vision for the future of identity security. During his opening keynote at Navigate London, the final event of SailPoint’s 2024 Navigate series, President Matt Mills announced the new SailPoint Identity Graph and the impact it is expected to have on the identity security ecosystem as part of the Atlas platform. With it, SailPoint will help bring critical context across identities, access controls, threat detection and risk management, giving companies a whole new visualisation layer that will help deliver the richer context needed to drive identity security decisions to new heights. With the APIs and third-party integrations that will underpin SailPoint’s Identity Graph, the company will enable unified connections to virtually all types of data, including XDR graphs, SIEM graphs, physical security systems and a lot more. Through this Identity Graph, SailPoint will arm companies to leverage unified identity data as context to better combat cyber risk.
Music licensing platform Slipstream has partnered with leading music publisher Kobalt for global music publishing administration. The deal, which includes an investment from Kobalt into Slipstream whose production music catalog contains more than 650,000 tracks, expands the capabilities of both companies in a significant way, combining both technology and expertise to serve the entire music publishing ecosystem, from the world’s top songwriters to brands and creative businesses of all kinds. Within the last 18 months alone, Kobalt’s sync team has placed its songwriters’ music in advertising by such brands as Apple, YSL, Bosch, Carlsberg, Polestar, Chanel, T-Mobile, Walmart, Ford, Downy, Target, Samsung and Coca-Cola and with such streamers as Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+, Paramount+, and Max.
Luzern eCommerce, the eCommerce Accelerator, has acquired Tambo Marketplaces Limited (Tambo), the UK based award-winning technology and services provider renowned for helping brands gain a competitive edge on Amazon and beyond through innovative AMC (Amazon Marketing Cloud), advertising and retail optimisation solutions. A key aspect of this acquisition is the combined strengths of both companies’ capabilities, now delivering a game-changing 1P/3P solution—uniquely combining Tambo’s 1P expert solutions with Luzern’s robust 3P capabilities. By adding Tambo’s advanced consultancy, analytics, and Amazon Marketing Cloud expertise, Luzern eCommerce now delivers a powerful end-to-end solution.
