This week’s round-up of the latest mergers and acquisitions, partnerships, and account moves includes Manus, Tencent, BBC, eBay, and Dentsu.
Dentsu’s New Stream Media has launched an end-to-end in-house retail offering, to help retailers and commerce owners make the most of their CRM and transaction data.
The offering brings together robust data storage with online and offline signals, transforming ID signals into powerful audiences for measurement and targeting, Little Black Book reports.
The Trade Desk has been chosen as dentsu’s inaugural technology integration partner – connecting directly with the demand side platform’s global retail marketplace.
This is the first time that data monetisation, commerce media, technology, and media practice has been combined into an end-to-end solution.
“At dentsu we’re focused on putting client data at the heart of commerce marketing efforts,” said Megan Cameron, EVP, commerce and retail media solution lead for New Stream Media.
“By building our own in-house commerce data infrastructure, we can now bring in even more real-time commerce signals, across channels, to our marketing decisions to maximize brand exposure across the full customer journey.”
Leaders take
This new offering from dentsu will help clients gain more control over their data, with scalable data targeting, storage, and measurement features. For retailers this could serve as a powerful new tool in scaling their data for greater insights into the customer journey and campaign performance.
The Trade Desk is the perfect partner for the rollout of these new features, as a global leader in demand side platforms.
eBay brings live shopping to affiliate programme
eBay has introduced livestream shopping into its affiliate marketing system, which adds eBay Live support to the eBay Partner Network as the commerce giant aims to drive traffic to its curated shopping events, Value Added Resource reports.
eBay affiliates are now able to earn commissions tied to eBay Live, which is eBay’s interactive livestream shopping experience for buyers to shop with real-time events hosted by sellers, brands, and influencers.
Leaders take
This is a new way for eBay for connect creators, publishers, and deal sites with Live shoppers – and for other affiliates to continue sending traffic to the marketplace through eBay’s affiliate marketing programme, EPN.
This comes as part of eBay’s shift within affiliate and advertising strategy, after it recently added new ad capabilities and expanded its Ambassador affiliate programme, with commissions opened for sellers and creators.
Getty Images calls off Shutterstock merger
The merger between Shutterstock and Getty Images has collapsed after the British Competition and Markets Authority said that Shutterstock must sell its editorial business before the deal is approved.
Getty confirmed that its board of directors voted not to proceed with the deal if it meant selling the editorial business.
Leaders take
This is an unsurprising development, and we even predicted this in a previous Deal Desk. An earlier attempted merger between Adobe and Figma collapsed after the CMA cited monopoly concerns within the software and product design market.
Other notable deals;
Tencent set to become Manus primary investor
Tencent is in talks to become the primary stakeholder in AI firm Manus as investors look to dismantle Meta’s $2bn acquisition.
Former investors along with the company’s management team are discussing a deal which would unwind Meta’s acquisition.
BBC and Channel 4 look to combine streaming services
British TV giants Channel 4 and the BBC are looking to combine their streaming services – and are looking to create a “sovereign platform” to rival US platforms like Netflix.
“We have had an approach and have had a discussion with Channel 4,” said BBC director-general Matt Brittin.
“In the world of the ITV-Sky merger, Channel 4 looks very sub-scale. All of these mergers are driven by the need to have scale. One opportunity for them would be in partnership with the BBC, having content on iPlayer, but continuing to be ad-funded.”
