CDP Institute

Have you been fretting that it’s too hard to buy things through your TV? Roku and Walmart now offer shoppable ads within Roku-delivered programming.  What’s special is the payments are made using Roku’s payment system, so there’s no need to visit the Walmart ecommerce site to complete the transaction.  They call this “t-commerce”, as well they should.

Maybe you’re looking to buy tools to build your own CDP-like system?  Walmart doesn’t sell those yet, but Aqfer does.  They just made them more accessible by adding their products to the Amazon Web Services Marketplace, where you can buy and run them.

How about buying a Web3 CRM?  I don’t know what that is, either, but it sounds important.  Holder will be happy to sell you one, along with a marketing automation engine and wallet data platform designed for “the tokenized world”.  More precisely, they can’t really sell you one, since they’re still in private beta.  But they did issue a press release and promise a public launch later this year.  

New privacy rules may have stifled some data collection, but data sharing is more popular than ever.  Publicis Groupe just launched a self-serve retail media platform that combines on-site ad serving, off-site and in-store ad placements, and results measurement based on sales.  It’s a collaboration between ecommerce ad platform CitriusAd and Publicis’ Epsilon agency, whose CORE ID individual identifiers tie it all together.

Out-of-home ad platform AdQuick is partnering with LiveRamp to target physical and digital out-of-home ads based on first-party data.  The targeting is at the group level: marketers send anonymized first-party audience lists to AdQuick, which uses LiveRamp’s identity graph to find locations where the same people or look-alike audiences are most likely to be found.  Sales data can also be added to the mix to measure results.

If you think you spotted a trend of connecting ads with sales results, you’re right.  Nielsen is headed in the same direction with its Nielsen ONE Alpha cross-platform measurement solution, which will combine details on ad campaign reach, frequency, and audience characteristics with the advertiser’s sales data.  At least, that’s the plan: the features won’t be available in real life until next year at the earliest.

We don’t usually report rumors and this item is a couple of days old.  But it’s huge news so I wanted you to see it.  The specific item is that, to avert EU anti-trust action, Alphabet may drop its requirement that YouTube ads be placed through its Ad Manager and Google Ads products.  What makes it huge is the implication that regulators may finally start to take serious action against Big Tech monopolies.

Microsoft is a charter member of the Big Tech club, but testing a retail marketplace within its Bing search engine makes it sound like a scrappy upstart nipping at the ankles of Amazon and Google.  The new marketplace will let consumers buy within the search results instead of sending them to retailers’ websites.    Details are sketchy but the marketplace may do targeting with information gathered by other Microsoft products – which puts the story back into the “Big Tech exploiting your data” department.

At $4+ billion revenue, Shopify is big but not Big Tech.  But it’s taking a page from the Big Tech playbook with Audiences, which will aggregate customer behaviors from participating merchants to develop target audiences that can then reached through Facebook and LinkedIn.  The new feature will help to overcome the loss in targeting capabilities resulting from Apple’s tighter privacy rules.  

Adobe announced several enhancements to its Real-Time CDP, including automatic enforcement of consumer privacy preferences and company data access policies, clean-room-like audience matching, predictive account and lead scoring, and tighter integration with Adobe Commerce.  Meanwhile, a separate announcement about enhancements to Adobe Analytics described it as the “single workspace for brands to unify data and insights across all media types”, which sounds CDP-ish. It’s a reminder that Adobe sees its CDP as one of several tools to access unified customer profiles stored in a separate platform layer.

Neustar has launched Marketing and Analytics Clean Room, following the industry trend of utterly generic product names. Despite the name, Neustar says its product is a “first-of-its-kind solution” that uses advanced identity resolution, machine learning, and privacy-enhancing technology to combine first, second, and third party data from many marketing and media sources including connected TV and walled gardens.

CDP Blueshift has released a bi-directional integration with cloud data platform Snowflake, making it easier to load Snowflake data into the Blueshift profile database and to post Blueshift data into Snowflake.  The dozens of other announcements from Snowflake’s Summit conference included integrations with data clean room products from Habu, Acxiom, and Aidentified, and a tighter connection with reverse ETL product Hightouch.