Main news in the world of technology, marketing and advertising during the week
A secret Google project
Google itself has provided evidence of its misconduct against competitors in the advertising market. In response to the Texas antitrust lawsuit, Google sent the court a document about the secret “Bernanke project.” According to the document, the company’s advertising products tracked the prices that advertisers offered in auctions for bidding data in Google Ads and used this data to their advantage. Advertisers and publishers did not know that Google stores and analyzes data about their activities on the platform. The Bernanke Project brought the company millions of dollars each year.
Microsoft buys out the leader in voice decoding
Microsoft has acquired Nuance, a technology company that uses speech-to-text technology, for $19.7 billion. It is the company’s second most expensive acquisition after LinkedIn in 2016 ($26 billion). Nuance’s best-known product is Dragon, which converts spoken language into text and adapts to the other person’s voice for accurate transcription. Nuance has already sold its technology to many services and applications — Siri’s digital assistant on Apple devices was created using Nuance technology.
Following the acquisition, Microsoft plans to increase the use of Nuance technology in healthcare. Nuance’s Dragon Medical One platform is already used in 77% of hospitals in the United States. It is speculated that Microsoft may integrate Nuance technology into its enterprise products, Teams and Cloud Azure.
Clubhouse: the end of the hype?
There was a data leak in Clubhouse: 1.3 million users of the application published their personal information on a hacker forum. In his Twitter account, Clubhouse stated that the hackers did not hack the application, and all published user data is public, because they can be seen by any Clubhouse user.
Today, the future of Clubhouse is increasingly being discussed in the media , or rather, it is being questioned. Recall that the company is valued at $4 billion. According to Sensor Tower, Clubhouse downloaded about 16 million users. In March, the number of monthly downloads of the application fell by 73%.
The media learned about TikTok’s plans
The media received an internal sales presentation of TikTok, with which the company’s managers demonstrate the capabilities of the platform to advertisers. From the presentation it became known that in the first half of 2021 TikTok plans to launch new advertising formats for e-commerce:
– Collection Ads. To demonstrate product catalogs and branded videos that will lead to the product site.
– Dynamic Product Ads. For retargeting: advertising will be selected automatically depending on the online behavior of users.
– Promo Tiles. To advertise promotions and discounts in the in-feed feed.
– Showcase Tiles. To advertise products in the video creators, where users can immediately go to the brand’s website.
In 2020, the advertising division of TikTok’s business in the United States grew by 500%.
