Clear Channel has agreed to sell its Europe-North segment to Bauer Media for $625 million, expanding the latter’s European coverage. Bauer will gain an additional offering in 12 markets including the United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Sweden. It already has an existing presence in seven of the 12 markets. Clear Channel Europe’s leadership team will continue to lead the out-of-home operations and the 1,400 staff. The transaction is expected to close at some point this year.
Reddit has launched AMA Ads, giving businesses a way to promote and track their “Ask Me Anything” sessions directly from the Reddit Ads Manager. It has also introduced Reddit Pro Trends to enable brands to see the topics that Reddit users are speaking about the most – businesses can track their brand name, product name, category, or latest viral trend. Meanwhile, the social platform has released new research exploring how “conversation is the new influencer” and deepened its brand safety offering.
Amazon’s advertising business has announced SQL generator in Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), providing a generative AI-powered natural language query capability for advertisers to develop insights. Advertisers can generate SQL queries for their desired audience use case, then run the queries in AMC to create their new audience, which can be activated in Amazon DSP and ads console.
Spotify has launched a Partner Program, giving creators in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia more ways to monetise their content, including audience-driven payouts from Spotify Premium video engagement, and the ability to monetise via ads in Spotify Free and on all other podcast listening platforms.
TikTok has unveiled its fifth annual “What’s Next Report,” identifying three key trends on its platform for the coming year. ‘Brand fusion’ will see businesses increasingly choose to work with a diverse group of creators, rather than opting to only work with one. Through ‘identity osmosis,’ brands will connect with TikTok communities on a deeper level, engaging to users directly in the comments and responding to feedback from fans. Finally, ‘creative catalysts,’ such as the use of artificial intelligence or choosing to adopt multifaceted storytelling strategies, will see marketers being more creative in the ways they engage audiences on the platform.
Digital experience platform Contentstack has announced the acquisition of Lytics, a customer data platform, creating a combined entity with over 500 customers – including Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Glassdoor, Universal Music Group, LiveNation, Clorox, and Ancestry – and 500 employees. Contentstack will use Lytics to bring audience insights, content analytics, and profile management to its platform, with the ambition of unlocking real-time personalisation for customers.
Retail media ad server Kevel has partnered with Vantage, a retail media orchestration platform, in a bid to enable retailers, marketplaces, and ecommerce platform to more easily manage their advertising operations. The collaboration will see Kevel’s ad serving capabilities combined with Vantage’s workflow automation and data orchestration platform to provide a solution for retailers to build retail media networks.
Sprout Social, a social media management platform, has published research highlighting that comment sections, @-mentions, and DMs have become consumers’ preferred methods of customer service, with 71% of social users warning that if a brand doesn’t respond to customer service questions on social media, they will choose to buy from a competitor instead. The research also found that 35% of social users make spontaneous purchases based on social media content a few times per year, with a comparable 33.5% reporting that they make spontaneous purchases on a monthly basis. Meanwhile, 95% of UK users believe it’s important brands do a good job at keeping up with culture online, more than a quarter of users believe brands have just 24 – 48 hours to jump on trends to remain relevant, and 94% of consumers think brands need to take up the torch to combat misinformation more than they are today. Despite this, 49% of social media practitioners don’t believe their executive team deeply understand the business impact of social media.
Marketing technology company NextRoll and Experian’s data activation platform Audigent have activated Audigent Interest Groups on the AdRoll DSP via Google’s Privacy Sandbox. The new use case for Google’s Protected Audience API (PAAPI) means interest groups can be created using DMP data and activated on DSPs.
Motor insurance provider 1st Central has announced a partnership with CRM agency Armadillo. The brief is to accelerate 1st Central’s growth by delivering added value to customers through creative, personalised, CRM experiences.
