Observed Signal · Mar 13, 2026 · Partnership · Source: https://martechseries.com/feed/ · Impact: 2/5 · Sentiment: Positive
Fluent Partners with Squire to Revolutionize Appointment-Based Commerce
Fluent, Inc. announced a partnership with Squire, an all-in-one barbershop management and booking platform, to extend Fluent’s commerce media solutions into appointment- and booking-based service environments. The collaboration will open ad placement and post-booking engagement opportunities across Squire’s platform—leveraging Fluent’s experimentation framework, transparent bidding marketplace, and monetization model aimed at preserving user experience. The integration uses Fluent’s Data Clean Room, built with Databricks, to securely combine Squire’s first-party customer data with Fluent’s proprietary identity graph and AI engine for relevance-driven offers following appointment confirmations. Company executives said the deal represents a move beyond traditional retail media into service-driven, high-intent transactional moments.
Expands commerce media beyond retail into appointment/booking platforms and highlights use of a Databricks-backed clean room and identity graph—relevant to ad monetization and first-party data strategies but not industry-shifting.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Fluent, Inc. announced a partnership with Squire, a barbershop management and booking platform.
- Squire powers booking, payments, marketing, and business management for thousands of barbershops and facilitates millions of appointments annually.
- The partnership uses Fluent’s Data Clean Room, built in partnership with Databricks, to combine Squire’s first-party data with Fluent’s identity graph and AI engine.
- The collaboration aims to enable post-booking, contextually aligned offers and expanded monetization across appointment-confirmation moments while preserving user experience.
- Fluent will apply an experimentation-led framework and a transparent bidding marketplace to optimize monetization on the Squire platform.
Connected Companies & Entities
3 Entities mappedOntology Mapping & Concepts
Related Market Signals & Shifts
Recent verified developments and strategic activity across this market segment.
Fluency Announces Agentic Advertising Orchestration Platform
Fluency, an agentic advertising operating system for search, social and programmatic channels, positions itself as enterprise infrastructure for safely running AI-driven ad campaigns at scale. The company says its SOC2-certified platform powers $3 billion in annual ad spend and separates AI that recommends from deterministic agents that execute, enforcing advertiser-defined governance across accounts, budgets, reporting and compliance. Fluency claims eight years of development, connections to major walled gardens and DSPs, and capabilities such as automated account and campaign creation, continuous budget pacing, real-time optimization, unified reporting and human sign-off before live spend.
V2 Strategic Advisors Launches Dedicated Databricks Practice for Media & Ad Sales
V2 Strategic Advisors, a boutique management and technology consulting firm specializing in data, analytics, and AI, has formally launched a dedicated Databricks practice. The practice aims to help global and high-growth media and ad sales organizations modernize their Revenue Operations by leveraging the Databricks Data + AI Platform. V2 will focus on unifying fragmented data architectures, building scalable analytics layers, and deploying AI-driven decisioning for pricing, forecasting, and campaign activation. The firm brings two decades of experience in media and ad sales to this initiative, positioning itself as a partner for organizations transitioning to AI-native operations. The announcement was made on October 7, 2026, and highlights the growing importance of data platforms in advertising technology.
State of Tech Industry 2026: AI Coding Agents Transform Software Engineering
The article, based on a keynote by Gergely Orosz at the LDX3 conference, presents a comprehensive analysis of the tech industry in late 2026. Key trends include the widespread shift to AI coding agents, with most engineers no longer writing code by hand and running 5-10 agents in parallel. Agent-authored PRs on GitHub now exceed human-authored ones, and AI-generated code is leading to a 'golden age' of migrations. The IDE is fading, replaced by CLI-first and agentic environments. Code reviews have become 'theatrical' due to overwhelming volume, and AI-only reviews are rising. Teams are smaller, engineering specializations are blurring, and there is a trend of CTOs resigning to build. Challenges include quality degradation, increased context switching, and infrastructure shortages (GPU, memory, CPU). The article also covers the rise of 'agentic software factories' and custom agent harnesses at major companies, alongside a trend of moving to open AI models to reduce costs.
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