CDP Institute

Here’s a surprise: this last newsletter of the year has some actual news.  Acquia has replatformed its CDP to run exclusively on Snowflake.  The change also let them give data scientists direct SQL access to the CDP data.  It’s a fitting end to a year when Snowflake has gained so much attention in the CDP community.

AI also got plenty of attention.  No surprise that 95% of IT leaders told Forrester that AI-based decisions will be very important within three years.  Less expected: 57% say the main use case is assisting human decision-makers, not replacing them, and 67% say decisions should be more widely distributed to key stakeholders.  Personalized customer experience ranks sixth on their list of AI use cases.

And then there’s first-party data, everybody’s favorite crush.  This Dun & Bradstreet report that finds it’s the top go-to-market priority (40%) among a cross-section of B2B sales, marketing, and data leaders, even ranking ahead of new customer acquisition (34%).  Data accuracy is their top obstacle to data-driven success.

If we seem more philosophical than usual this week, it’s not the result of some Scrooge-like holiday transformation (sorry, Jamie), but because hard news is scarce.   Still, it’s a welcome opportunity to talk about long-term trends, like this Axios piece that quotes Insider Intelligence as finding the Google/Meta share of U.S. digital ad revenue will fall below 50% this year.  It’s no surprise – the share peaked back in 2017 – but a good reminder that duopoly power is less secure than it seems.

Mobile gaming is one of the industries that are stealing time from search and social activities.  So it’s a bit surprising to see this estimate from data.ai (formerly App Annie) that consumer spend on mobile gaming will drop by 5% in 2022 and 3% in 2023.  Note this is an estimate of what consumers will spend; spending on mobile advertising is still expected to rise by 7.5% next year, outpacing other ad media.

The people selling mobile apps had a tough 2022, with privacy changes heading the list of challenges.  Liftoff reports they’re evenly balanced between positive outlook (37%) and negative outlook (36%) for next year, with gaming marketers much more worried than the rest.  Interestingly, solid majorities say privacy changes are bad for marketers (54%) but good for consumers (59%).  At least they’re honest.

‘Tis the season for advice from companies you don’t trust.  Having created immense uncertainty with its ever-changing schedule for third-party cookie deprecation and rotating cast of privacy-safe(ish) targeting alternatives, Google has set out its latest version of the path forward.  It mostly comes down to letting Google target for you and grade its own results.

Meta also has a big “trust me” sticker attached to its latest offering, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. Similar to Google’s Performance Max, the service asks marketers to share customer lists, ad materials, campaign targets, and a budget, and then let Meta decide what ads to buy and offers to show. Like Google, Meta will tell advertisers how well it did rather than giving them data to judge for themselves.

TikTok is offering more modest help, in the form of a report on marketing trends for 2023. It’s exceptionally well organized, but the trust barrier is high: the federal government is poised to ban TikTok on government computers and a recent study found TikTok pushes self-harm and suicide videos to vulnerable youths within minutes of registration.

One of this year’s most important meta-stories has been regulators’ increasingly effective pushback against seemingly unstoppable tech giants.  We’ve had three examples in the past week, starting with Amazon’s agreement to reduce the advantages it gives to its own products and stop helping itself with data it collects about sales by independent merchants.  Both changes are in response to European Union anti-trust activity and presumably apply only within Europe.

EU regulators have just warned Meta about using ad-related data from competitors to benefit their Facebook Marketplace classified advertising service.  Like Amazon, Meta has been leveraging its control over what users see to favor its own products.  That’s probably illegal in the U.S. too, but so far the tech industry has been largely successful in restraining U.S. regulators and Congress from taking action.  (For a rare exception, see today’s Privacy Newsletter item about the Federal Trade Commission’s $520 million settlement with Epic Games.)

Most potentially impactful of all, Apple is reportedly planning to allow third-party app stores on the iPhone.   Sellers could presumably bypass Apple’s 30% commission on payments, a sore point for many and huge profit source for Apple.  Apple has faced some pressure about this in the U.S., where iPhone market share is much higher than elsewhere.  But new EU regulations are what’s forcing the change.