Monday November 13, 2023

At its first developer conference, OpenAI introduced new products including new text-to-speech models and an updated version of GPT-4, among other features. “We believe that if you give people better tools, they will do amazing things,” said CEO Sam Altman in a keynote.

FreeWheel announced the launch of Audience Manager, a new solution that enables publishers to unlock faster audience activation across screens. “We launched Audience Manager, which is powered by the FreeWheel Identity Network, to help address many of today’s industry challenges, including a need for real-time insights and interoperability,” said David Dworin, Chief Product Officer, FreeWheel. “With the shift towards audience based buying and with the impending disappearance of identifiers, marketers today need solutions to reach more precise and addressable audiences in premium video. FreeWheel’s Audience Manager helps them do exactly that.”

Following the divestment of Kantar Public from Kantar Group in September 2022, the company is rebranding across Europe, Asia Pacific and the US as Verian. “Our business works across all areas of the policy cycle, from research, programme evaluation, behaviour change, through to the creative execution of public communication,” said Dr. Michelle Harrison, Global CEO at Verian. “But at our heart, across all our diverse teams and continents, our people are in the profession of seeking truth for their clients. Through their research and consulting, on behalf of public policy makers, they are powering decisions that shape the world. That is how we capture our new brand purpose.”

Proto had its first unscripted, non-competition experience on Hulu’s “The Kardashians,” when Kris Jenner visited Proto HQ in Van Nuys and Howie Mandel helped her beam into her daughter’s house in Calabasas. The night before Proto was used on air by Jimmy Kimmel Live for the second time, this time in collaboration with People’s Sexiest Man Alive reveal, when Patrick Dempsey beamed onto the stage in a Proto Epic unit as a hologram with VR masks on while the audience tried to guess his identity.

A new category of extreme power users who consume more than 5 TB per month of broadband data has been identified in the 3Q 2023 OpenVault Broadband Insights report. OVBI notes that extreme power users on average stream 13 times as much data as users who consume 1 TB or less. The majority of extreme power users (59%) are on gigabit tier speed plans; however, more than 7% are provisioned for speeds of 100 Mbps or slower. The category, while small, grew 60% year-over-year through 3Q23.“Although extreme power users that average 5 TB or more monthly currently make up a modest fraction of subscribers, their numbers are steadily increasing in tandem with the widespread adoption of faster speed tiers,” the report notes. “Their heavy usage patterns – particularly in the upstream – will increasingly impact network performance, potentially resulting in subpar experiences for many customers, especially when they don’t receive the speeds they were promised.”

Research from a new start-up, Vectara, indicates that chatbots tasked with summarizing facts make things up – or “hallucinate” – more often than users may realize. According to Vectara’s open-source Hallucination Evaluation Model leaderboard, the hallucination rate for OpenAI’s technologies was around 3%, Meta’s Systems was about 5%, Anthropic’s was over 8% and Google’s Palm Chat was estimated to offer false information 27% of the time. “For organizations to effectively implement Generative AI solutions including chatbots, they need a clear view of the risks and potential downsides,” said Simon Hughes, AI researcher and ML engineer at Vectara. “For the first time, Vectara’s Hallucination Evaluation Model allows anyone to measure hallucinations produced by different LLMs. As a part of Vectara’s commitment to industry transparency, we’re releasing this model as open source, with a publicly accessible Leaderboard, so that anyone can contribute to this important conversation.”

MiQ announced the acquisition of French media governance and data quality company, Grasp, whose quality assurance and compliance products prevent non-compliances and enforce governance frameworks before campaign launch. “Grasp’s technology strategically adds the first SaaS platform to our offering and – as we double down on investments that are future-facing and focused on advancing the current programmatic experience – will prove instrumental in strengthening media buying for brands and agencies across the globe,” said Gurman Hundal, MiQ’s co-founder and CEO.

Community-driven entertainment company TMB announced a collaboration with user-generated content monetization, licensing and distribution platform ViralHog in an effort to uphold copyright protection and unauthorized usage for user-generated content. “For ViralHog, this collaboration with TMB emphasizes our dedication to protecting our Licensor content from unauthorized usage. By harnessing TMB’s expertise, we are reaffirming our standing as the ultimate platform for licensing and monetizing UGC,” said Ryan Bartholomew, founder at ViralHog.

AI and metaverse technology and content company Futureverse aims to power the next evolution of the creator economy with the AI supercomputer NVIDIA DGX H100. Futureverse is the first New Zealand-based company to own an NVIDIA DGX H100. Artists, filmmakers, designers and everyday consumers with limited technology expertise will have access to resources tap into personalization and customization of content creation fueled by generative AI.

We Have Big News for You

For the first time, Cynopsis, AdExchanger, AdMonsters and Chief Marketer are joining forces to produce a one-of-its-kind summit. Taking place on March 13-14 in NYC, CTV Connect 2024 will bring together buyers and sellers for a conversation about the future of CTV.

FIND OUT MORE

ShowSeeker, creator of a cloud-based order management system for the advertising industry, is collaborating with Spectrum Reach for the launch of Pilot®, ShowSeeker’s solution to automated workflows in the media sales business. “We launched the Pilot platform as our dedicated order management system after collaborating with ShowSeeker to create a solution to optimize the order entry process,” said Chris Faw, SVP of Operations at Spectrum Reach. “Pilot not only streamlines our workflows, but also equips us with a modernized solution that adapts to the evolving demands of both linear television and advanced advertising.”

Wunderkind announced a holistic ad monetization and audience development offering to help publishers maximize the value of their visitors with a unified user experience. The Publisher Growth Suite, which has been in private beta with select publisher partners including CNN and AP News, offers publishers tools to identify their audience and extract the optimal value in the form of email submissions, subscriptions, programmatic addressability and high-yielding ad placements.

MEASUREMENT

Comscore announced a new partnership with the NHL’s Minnesota Wild. The multi-year agreement provides the team with access to Comscore’s local television measurement solution. Comscore Local TV will now be the exclusive measurement solution to support programming insights and revenue opportunities in the nine local markets, including Minneapolis-St. Paul and Milwaukee, that air the Wild’s games and original programming.

Allen Media Group has selected datafuelX to provide data-driven linear media plans across its networks, starting with The Weather Channel. Through this partnership, datafuelX’s full-service SaaS platform, M3 will enable AMG to generate optimized data-driven linear media plans against advertisers’ advanced audience targets. This will be done through VideoAmp, the new measurement currency AMG selected for the 2023-2024 Upfront season.

Cynopsis Team