Systems and methods for providing an advertisement marketplace where buyers and sellers can trade mediacast advertisement inventory programmatically at local, national, and/or worldwide levels. The marketplace system may include a seller-controlled marketplace system which connects sellers with buyers and offers revenue management tools for optimizing yields across direct and programmatic channels. The advertisement inventory is bought and sold as canonical inventory units which group similar but discrete advertisement slots together. The marketplace system may include a seller side platform (SSP) for sellers through which sellers can access demand across multiple sales channels and can make advertisement inventory available and accept or reject bids based on marketplace demand.

A cross-entity and cross-retailer platform is provided that captures transaction data (and/or browser history data associated with online browser-based transactions), indexes, and stores the data in a cloud-accessible data store. A cloud service is provided that custom processes retailer and entity-defined workflows based on purchase transactions using the data store. The service discovers and updates trends and patterns associated with item sales for a given retailer or for a given entity across channels associated with in-store and online item sales. The trends and patterns are dynamically reported to the corresponding entity or the corresponding retailer. The entities may comprise manufacturers of an item, a supplier of the item, a distributor of the item, and a Consumer Packaging Goods (CPG) company of the item.

Described herein is a technique for generating personalized scores for a cohort of users of an online service, where the scores are for use in ranking connection recommendations, in the context of generating connection recommendations for a user of the online service. The technique involves using a linear programming (LP) problem solver to solve a multi-objective optimization problem formulated to incorporate competing objectives and specific constraints. The technique allows for personalizing recommendations scores, specifically, to ensure that infrequent users are receiving invitations to connect with other users, thereby increasing overall interaction and engagement.

This paper presents a practical method for measuring the impact of multiple marketing events on sales, including marketing events that are not traditionally trackable. The technique infers which of several competing media events are likely to have caused a given conversion. The method is tested using hold-out sets, and also a live media experiment for determining whether the method can accurately predict television-generated web conversions.

Systems and methods are provided for retail environments. In one implementation, a non transitory computer-readable medium may include instructions that when executed by a processor cause the processor to perform a method. The method may include determining product availability data indicative of an availability of one or more products on at least one retail shelf in a retail store; using the product availability data to generate a synthetic visual representation of the one or more products on the at least one retail shelf; presenting the synthetic visual representation on a display; receiving from a user an input indicative of a selection of at least a portion of the synthetic visual representation; and in response to receiving the input, presenting on the display an actual image corresponding to the selected at least a portion of the synthetic visual representation, wherein the actual image was acquired with an image sensor.

The subject technology identifies a series of journey event types in an online user journey, the event types including an impression event, an email event, a click event, and a website visit, and assigns an encoder to each event type. Using an assigned encoder, the technology encodes each event type to generate an encoded vector for each event type. The encoded vector is representative of at least a portion of the online user journey relating to that event type. The technology generates an encoded vector for each event type to create a set of encoded vectors, the set of encoded vectors including one or more of an impression event encoded vector, an email event encoded vector, a click event encoded vector, and a website visit encoded vector. The technology aggregates the set of encoded vectors to generate an output of the online user journey encoder, the output including a composite encoded user journey vector for training one or more attention layers to make a prediction.

In one implementation a method of transmitting a multimedia file over a data network is provided that involves receiving from a device in a data network a first message in a first protocol that request first data associated with the multimedia file, the first data being useable by the device to establish a streaming session that involves a transmission of the multimedia file. The first message includes identifying data of a referring site. The method also involves transmitting to the device the first data and optionally the identifying data of the referring site and then receiving from the device a second message in a second protocol for the purpose of creating a streaming session associated with the multimedia file. A streaming session is then created for transmitting the multimedia file to the device. In another implementation a method is provided that involves receiving in a computing device from a referring site an identifier of first data associated with a multimedia file and identifying data of the referring site, wherein the first data is useable for establishing a streaming session for downloading the multimedia file. The method further involves transmitting from the computing device a first message in a first protocol that requests the first data associated with the multimedia file and receiving in the computing device the first data. Upon receiving the first data the computing device transmits a second message in a second protocol for the purpose of creating the streaming session associated with the multimedia file, the second message including the first data and the identifying data of the referring site. The computing device then receives via the streaming session, all or a portion of the multimedia file. In some implementations, the first protocol and the second protocol are the same.

A system including one or more processors and one or more non-transitory computer-readable media storing computing instructions configured to run on the one or more processors and perform: receiving transaction data comprising items previously purchased; comparing the first item to the second item; identifying the first item to be related to the second item; aggregating the first product type and the second product type into a first category bundle having a first theme defined by the first and second product types; assigning a first affinity score to the first and second items based on the transaction data; detecting the first item as being a first item of interest; and when the first affinity score of the first item exceeds a threshold, displaying, to the user while browsing the one or more websites, the first category bundle comprising the first and second items. Other embodiments are described.

A computing device is configured to generate a content reference for content displayed on a webpage. An encrypted reference is generated for the content reference. The content is provided, with the content reference, to a client device. A website is provided for the client device upon selection of the content by a user input on the webpage. The website includes an offering and related offerings associated with the content. In accordance with a web action received from the website, a logical table is updated with an entry associated with the encrypted reference. The update may be associated with a credit or a charge based at least in part on the web action for the offering or the related offerings.

An apparatus for providing customized advertisements includes a database that stores a plurality of electronic advertisements, receives biometric information of a client from at least one biometric device of the client, and receives receptivity information of the client responding to the plurality of electronic advertisements, as well as a processor that accesses the database, and maps the biometric information and the receptivity information and analyzes the mapped information to generate customized marketing data. The processor also calculates a receptivity probability for each of the plurality of electronic advertisements based on the customized marketing data by using current biometric state of the client, selects an electronic advertisement from the plurality of electronic advertisements based on the calculated receptivity probabilities, and outputs to the client the selected electronic advertisement.