CDP Institute

Amazon Web Services is adding a data clean room service that will simplify privacy-safe data sharing among AWS customers. The company also announced plans to add identity resolution services in the near future. It’s all part of a grand AWS for Advertising and Marketing program that features 150+ partners including many of your favorite CDPs.

Meta’s leadership richly deserves any criticism we can offer, but they’re not only reason that promising anti-trust and privacy bills have stalled in the current U.S. Congress.  So enjoy this deepfake of Mark Zuckerberg but remember that other big tech firms have been equally busy ensuring the bills don’t come to vote.

It takes Google parent Alphabet less than thirty minutes to earn $13.2 million, so it’s hard to be impressed when they contribute that amount to a worthwhile cause.   Still, let’s give them some credit for supporting Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network.  How’s this: we won’t think anything bad about them for half an hour?

This IAB study finds that connected TV and paid search are expected to be the fastest-growing ad channels next year, while linear TV and other traditional media continue to shrink.  More intriguing: marketers are focusing more investment on foundational tools like measurement and first party data, and less on specific ad channels.  Download for deep dives into retail media networks and the metaverse.

Kantar is also reading the media tea leaves.  They find that audience fragmentation and higher ad costs are pushing marketers to rely more on their own resources: 80% want in-house segmentation tools; 78% of large businesses plan to strengthen their in-house data platforms; and 64% believe data quality will become more important.  They also spy a counter-trend of consumers preferring real-world channels including sponsored events and ads in magazines, cinema, point of sale, and digital out of home.

Yahoo somehow feels they can predict the future well enough to sign thirty-year deal for Taboola to power Yahoo’s native content and ad targeting.  Yahoo will buy just under 25% of the company as part of the transaction.  Perspective: it’s one year since Yahoo was purchased by private equity investors; it’s two years since Taboola failed to consummate a planned merger with Outbrain; thirty years ago, neither firm existed.

The gradual erosion of Facebook and Google’s advertising duopoly is an important if slow-moving trend.  Bloomreach is moving things along with an integration that can send target audiences to Snapchat as easily as Facebook and Google.  They can also use AI to select the best audiences for each ad.

Integrations between CDPs and other systems shouldn’t really be news, since integration is a core CDP function.  But it’s still interesting to see where vendors focus their attention.  So let’s note that Tealium just announced a new Identity Partner Ecosystem that includes connectors for multiple identity and third-party data providers including Acxiom, Merkle, and Neustar.

Half of global web traffic already can’t be tracked to individuals due to cookieless browsers and refused consent, says this ID5 report.  They see wide adoption (63%) of alternative identity solutions like the one ID5 sells, which is based primarily on hashed email addresses.  They cast doubt on alternatives that rely on user log-ins, noting that 59% of publishers say fewer than 10% of their users log in.

Like trouble, bad behavior by Meta shows up whether you look for it or not.  The latest is an open-source language model that was supposed to provide reliable search results because it was trained on academic papers.  Alas, it was quickly withdrawn after reviewers found that it returned results that were grammatical and plausible but also incorrect, not to mention filled with “antisemitism, homophobia, and misogyny.”  How can this be a surprise?

Amazon is no model citizen (see its history of union busting and employee injuries) but they at least try to look responsible. The latest effort is a virtual health care service called Amazon Clinic, which will “message-based virtual care” for more than 20 non-emergency health conditions such as allergies, acne and hair loss. It will complement, and perhaps help to gain approval for, Amazon’s proposed purchase of primary care providing One Medical.

We’re headed into the Thanksgiving holiday so let’s end on a positive note.  The press release for this Veracode report is headlined “73 Percent of Retail Applications Contain Security Flaws, but Only a Quarter Are Fixed” which is the type of clickbait that headline writers love.  But the report actually finds that security practices have improved in recent years.  It also finds much greater use of microservices architectures and open source libraries, which will make some tech geeks happy.