As competition to reach a targeted and increasingly urbane customer base reaches new heights, brands are increasing their ad spend by investing in new and innovative campaigns, entering into partnerships and rolling out solutions that are translating to increasing spend and brand loyalty by customers.

Such unique ad interventions include a partnership between Mitsubishi Electric US, Inc., a pioneering player in aerial vehicle-powered logistics and resource management, and Sustainable Skylines, a Miami-based drone advertising and data analytics company that uses drones to tow industry‑standard sized banners over high-density populated locations.

Through the collaboration, Sustainable Skylines will use the Mitsubishi Electric AnyMile™ drone logistics management platform to cost effectively and safely manage all drone-based advertising campaigns and aerial advertising operations, including logistics and resource management.

At the same time, OrkaTV, the marketplace for Streaming TV, and Vibe, the all-in-one TV ad platform, have announced a partnership to bring performance advertising to Streaming TV. For the first time, Vibe enables advertisers to drive brand awareness, measure the impact of their campaign on website traffic, retarget web visitors on TV, and track lower-funnel product conversions.

Innovid, an independent advertising platform for the delivery, personalization, and measurement of converged TV across linear, CTV, and digital, has announced the launch of Instant Optimization, a machine-learning solution that empowers converged TV marketers with the ability to immediately optimize ad performance in flight.

And MediaGo has announced a partnership and integration with TheOptimizer.io, a campaign management platform (CMP) in the native and social advertising markets. The partnership provides advertisers with a unified solution to streamline the oversight and management of all accounts and campaigns within a single platform.

This comes as a recent report by dentsu dubbed Global Ad Spend Forecasts indicate that advertising investment is forecast to grow by 3.3% globally in 2023, an anticipated $727.9 billion will be spent worldwide by the end of the year, according to this mid-year ‘reforecast’ of the twice-yearly report.

In partnership developments making headlines this week, Entravision, a global advertising solutions, media and technology company serving clients across more than 40 countries, has entered into an international sales partnership with Pinterest, the visual inspiration platform.

Through this partnership, Entravision will offer advertisers outreach and campaign management in various countries across Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, where Pinterest is not currently serving ads, and will enable these advertisers to reach audiences where ads are served in Europe and the U.S.

Intuit Mailchimp, the email marketing and automation brand, and Wix.com Ltd., a global SaaS platform to create, manage and grow an online presence, have announced a multi-year bi-lateral strategic partnership.

Accenture has acquired Signal, an integrated marketing firm based in Tokyo, Japan. The acquisition further strengthens Accenture's ability to support clients' marketing transformation across owned, paid and earned media.

In the startups scene, Luxembourg’s MarketLeap, formerly Gonuggets, has secured an additional €1.5 million in seed funding to accelerate the operating system’s technical development, including the addition of new service offerings, and to facilitate expansion into the US while scaling UK operations.

Vistry, a San Diego-based startup leading the way in Generative AI and restaurant automation, has announced the launch of its Conversational AI platform, along with its AI Customer Assistant chatbot. The chatbot assistant, called LumoChat (Lumo), is designed to assist customers in completing their online ordering tasks across different channels such as web and mobile.

In other news this week, Ogilvy and Joe Public are some of the winners in the 2023 Lories Africa and Middle East. Chicken Licken took home the Brand of the Year Award with Ogilvy SA being awarded the Agency of the Year Award as well as being named the coveted Regional Agency Group of the Year.

And finally, Outbrain Inc. , a technology platform for the open web, has announced a strategic partnership with Cedara, the first end-to-end carbon intelligence platform, to support Outbrain and its customers’ sustainability and decarbonization efforts.

Bob Koigi is an editor at Marketing Report One

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