Signal AI acquires Memo
Signal AI acquired Memo, the platform which provides article-level readership data directly from publishers, in a cash-only deal. The agreement brings Memo’s direct relationships with publishers and its unique dataset into Signal AI’s existing reputation and risk intelligence platform, which already serves more than 800 global clients. The acquisition enables what Signal AI describes as impact-based crisis intelligence, allowing communications teams to prioritise genuine reputational threats based on how many people actually read a story, rather than on potential reach or impression counts alone. Signal AI received a $USD 165 million investment last September.
Oriane receives investment, readies product launch
Oriane, a new AI-native video intelligence platform, announced $USD 2 million in seed funding and the imminent launch of a platform designed to make millions of social videos fully searchable by visual content, audio, product appearances, and social signals. The round was backed by Antler US, Clint Capital, Hartmann Capital, and angels from Google, PayPal, and Sony. The company is positioning itself as a direct response to a structural blind spot in existing social listening tools, which were built for text analysis of captions and hashtags rather than the video content that now constitutes 91% of internet traffic. Oriane is set for a 31 March launch.
Publisher AI Licensing Gains Pace
News Corp has signed a multi-year AI licensing deal with Meta worth up to USD 50M per year for at least three years, allowing the social media company’s AI tools to access archive and real-time content from News Corp titles in the US and UK, including the Wall Street Journal, The Sun, and the New York Post. In the same week, UK national and regional publisher Reach agreed a usage-based content deal with Amazon, permitting its journalism to support Amazon’s Nova AI model and the Alexa assistant. Both deals formed part of an accelerating landscape in which major publishers chose commercial AI partnerships alongside, or instead of, legal action. The developments were tracked by Press Gazette‘s rolling publisher AI deals tracker, which also recorded a new lawsuit from Denmark’s DPCMO against OpenAI. All media monitoring organisations need to pay close attention to how publishers are licensing their content to LLMs.
Brandwatch: 25% of Marketers understand their audience
Brandwatch released The Marketer of 2026, a report surveying 1,028 marketing professionals and analysing 750,000 online industry conversations, which revealed that only 25% of marketers said they understood their audiences very well, identifying a growing insight gap despite unprecedented access to data. The research found that the hardest problems for marketers remained predicting audience behaviour, interpreting cultural shifts, and uncovering the reasons behind audience decisions rather than merely what they did.
Sprout Social: Social now primary source for news
Sprout Social published the findings of its Q1 2026 Pulse Survey, conducted with more than 2,000 social media users across the US, UK, and Australia, which found that social media had become the primary channel for breaking news discovery, overtaking television as well as podcasts, news apps, and print media for the first time. The trend was most pronounced among Gen Z. However, the survey documented a sharp rise in scepticism: 88% of respondents said AI-generated video tools had eroded their trust in the news, with misinformation and AI slop cited as the top two drivers of doubt.
Media Intelligence Product Updates
Here are some of the product announcements that caught our attention this month:
