Music to your ears? Meta introduced AudioCraft, an AI tool that generates realistic music from audio and text. “While we’ve seen a lot of excitement around generative AI for images, video, and text, audio has seemed to lag a bit behind,” said the company on its web site. “There’s some work out there, but it’s highly complicated and not very open, so people aren’t able to readily play with it. Generating high-fidelity audio of any kind requires modeling complex signals and patterns at varying scales. Music is arguably the most challenging type of audio to generate as it’s composed of local and long-range patterns, from a suite of notes to a global musical structure with multiple instruments.” AudioCraft consists of three models, MusicGen, AudioGen and EnCodec, which will be open-sourced to give researchers and practitioners access to train their own models with their own datasets.

Google is adding contextual images and videos to its Search Generative Experiment, an AI-powered search feature. SGE now shows images or videos related to the search query. In addition, Google is showing the date links were published that are recommended by SGE.

Google’s DeepMind robotic team introduced Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2), a vision-language-action (VLA) model that learns from both web and robotics data, and translates this knowledge into generalized instructions for robotic control, while retaining web-scale capabilities. “Because RT-2 is able to transfer knowledge from a large corpus of web data, it already has an idea of what trash is and can identify it without explicit training,” wrote DeepMind’s Distinguished Scientist and Head of Robotics, Vincent Vanhoucke. “It even has an idea of how to throw away the trash, even though it’s never been trained to take that action. And think about the abstract nature of trash — what was a bag of chips or a banana peel becomes trash after you eat them. RT-2 is able to make sense of that from its vision-language training data and do the job.”

Starting this month, Microsoft will no longer support Cortana in Windows as a standalone app. Users can still access productivity features in Windows and Edge, which have increased AI capabilities, and the change only impacts Cortana in Windows. The productivity assistant will continue to be available in Outlook Teams, Teams Mobile, Microsoct Teams display, and Microsoft Teams rooms.

Amazon reported quarterly sales of $134.4 billion, up 11% and topping analysts’ estimates. Amazon’s AWS cloud-computing business grew 12% year-over-year to $22.1 billion, and advertising saw a 22% lift to $10.68 billion. The company is “continuing to see strong demand for our advertising services as the team keeps innovating for brands, including the ramp up for ‘Thursday Night Football’ [on Prime Video] with the ability for advertisers to tailor their spots by audience and create interactive experiences for consumers,” said CEO Andy Jassy.

Apple beat analysts’ estimates with quarterly sales up 8.2%, to $21.21 billion, and 1 billion paid subscriptions across all apps and services, up 150 million year over year. Sales of iPhones missed expectations at $39.7 billion, down 2.4% year over year.

DNEG, a visual effects and animation studio, announced the release of the open source beta version of xSTUDIO via the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) GitHub repository. The open source project for xSTUDIO will be hosted and managed by the Academy Software Foundation as part of Open Revie Initiative, an umbrella project working to build a unified open source toolset for playback, review and approval of motion picture and related professional media.

Service Electric Cablevision announced a strategic partnership with Nrby to deploy its Nrby Platform. The integration will significantly improve the visibility of SECV’s infrastructure assets, optimize operations, and heighten subscriber experience.

PrivacyHawk has launched the Privacy Score, a free way for individuals to learn their privacy and personal data risk like a credit score. The Privacy Score calculates and rates privacy and data risk on a scale between 300 and 850 (the same range as a credit score). The higher the score, the more secure personal data is likely to be.

Castify.ai, an OTT omnichannel content distribution and monetization platform, has elevated its current relationship with VIZIO as a Preferred Developer Partner, by providing a broad selection of its branded OTT apps on VIZIO. “As a VIZIO Preferred Developer, Castify.ai provides an end-to-end solution that helps content creators seamlessly launch streaming applications on our platform,” said Seta Goldstein, Senior Director of Business Development and Partnerships at VIZIO. “We look forward to the opportunity to add even more programming to VIZIO with Castify.ai.”

William Shatner beamed live from Los Angeles to Advertising Week APAC’s event in Sydney, Australia on August 2 via Proto hologram. The “Star Trek” star appeared in volumetric 4K and could see and hear the audience and respond in real time. Proto also announced that Shatner has signed on as an advisor to the company.

André Swanston, Co-Founder and former CEO of Tru Optik, announced the formation of Swanston Organization, to advance the mission of innovation and inclusion. “The Swanston Organization is driven by three core beliefs: There is a better way to create and scale companies, there is tremendous return to be made by investing in underrepresented entrepreneurs, and it is both a privilege and responsibility to help unlock opportunity for others,” said Swanston, Chairman and CEO.

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ADVERTISING

Spotify will be the first audio platform to be integrated directly into WPP’s products and solutions, via a global strategic partnership enabling WPP to offer its clients early access to Spotify’s ad products and first-party intelligence. WPP will work with Spotify to deliver thought leadership and scaled training programs for its employees and clients that focus on digital audio creativity and Spotify’s innovative ad products. WPP’s teams and clients will also have early access to Spotify’s neuro-insights research focused on audience trends and insights.

Retail marketing budgets are set to rise, according to a Wunderkind survey of top retailers that found 44% of respondents anticipate an increase in performance marketing budgets. Marketing technology budgets tied for second place at 39%. Other findings include:
99% of respondents consider their website a crucial channel for customer acquisition, but 73% admit that they can only identify between 50% to 75% of their website visitors.Despite recognizing the importance of collecting as much data as possible, 85% of respondents claim to be only moderately or slightly reliant on first-party data.When it comes to digital and social advertising, 59% of respondents say it’s “not improving customer knowledge,” 50% say it’s “not increasing brand loyalty,” and 44% say these tactics are “not increasing sales.”

AdRoll, a marketing and advertising platform for brands, is teaming with WooCommerce, the open-source ecommerce platform for WordPress, for an integration enables merchants to track and target online shoppers more effectively with cross-channel campaigns. The integration allows merchants to automatically place a pixel on their website to track customer behaviors in real time, such as adding a product to the cart or viewing the checkout page. The data is used to create customer segments that can be targeted with personalized ads and emails based on their shopping journey.

Digital ad tech company illumin (formerly AcuityAds) and DOOH ad tech developer Broadsign they have teamed up to integrate the Broadsign supply-side-platform with illumin’s journey advertising platform. The combined technologies make it easier for illumin users to target audiences at every phase of the funnel, from brand awareness to brand consideration and loyalty.

Content data platform IRIS.TV has partnered with GroupM to leverage the IRIS_ID as the primary method for accessing video-level data enriched by contextual and brand-suitability data partners. “We have an ironclad commitment to brand-suitable advertising on every medium, and the IRIS_ID provides a level of transparency that enhances the way we invest in CTV environments,” said Kevin Sheehan, Director, Programmatic Investment, GroupM.

AnalyticsIQ, provider of predictive people-based data, announced a new relationship with Claritas that enables AnalyticsIQ to offer PRIZM® Premier segmentation codes. “Today’s consumer demands individual-level personalization, making the need for reliable, granular data more important than ever for marketers,” said Jay Stockwell, Chief Revenue Officer at Claritas. “Providing PRIZM Premier in conjunction with AnalyticsIQ’s predictive people-based data will help marketers improve ROI by unlocking rich segment personas and actioning on them with quality data.”

MEASUREMENT

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement announced it is conducting a study to examine the future role and value of panels for TV and cross-platform measurement in the US. “Consumer research panels have played a critical part of the television measurement ecosystem for decades,” said Jon Watts, Managing Director, CIMM. “However, the growing use of different datasets to support measurement, the shift of viewing to connected devices and increasingly sophisticated modeling techniques have led many industry participants to question the value of panels. At the same time, we’re seeing a proliferation of new panels for calibration and other purposes and steady improvements in panel technologies. This project aims to align the industry around a clear understanding and common vision for the future role and value of panels in the US TV market.” The study will be led by Joan FitzGerald, Data ImpacX, and Jonathan Steuer, Anonymous Media Research.

STREAMING

Max has launched the OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network hub on its platform in the US. “Our mission at OWN is to deliver programming that serves the female Black viewer, and this cross-portfolio collaboration presents a terrific opportunity to expand on that mission,” said Tina Perry, President of OWN. “OWN’s premium content will not only be available to our current fans, but it will also be available to a whole new audience that can easily access our programming with this dedicated hub.” The OWN hub can be found on the Max platform within the “Brand Spotlight” carousel on the homepage.

DistroTV is partnering with TV9 Network, the news network in India, enabling DistroTV users worldwide to stream TV9 Network’s news coverage across its national and regional channels for free. It’s the first time that TV9 Network’s seven live-streaming language channels will be available to a global audience. TV9 Network operates a national Hindi news channel, TV9 Bharatvarsh, and several regional channels.

Brightcove has struck an agreement with Yahoo that will leverage and integrate Brightcove’s streaming technology platform across Yahoo’s portfolio of digital properties. As the exclusive streaming technology provider for Yahoo, Brightcove will power its video streaming from end to end.

Loco, the esports and live-streaming platform, has partnered with audience engagement suite LiveLike enhance the live-streaming experience for users and provide interactive features to the gaming community. Loco is using the LiveLike platform to introduce users to the quest feature, encouraging users to participate.

Rockbot now offers AccuWeather NOW. Similar to other content provided by Rockbot, AccuWeather NOW is a live streaming program that continuously updates in real-time.

Cynopsis Team