CDP Institute

The U.S. Department of Justice yesterday filed its second big anti-trust lawsuit against Google.  This one targets Google’s digital advertising business, while the 2020 lawsuit focused on search marketing.  The 155-page complaint offers a step-by-step history of Google’s ad-related activities and demands that Google divest its ad server and ad exchange businesses.

Simon Data has launched Activate, a no-code tool that lets marketers combine data from Snowflake and other sources to build profiles and customer segments.  This is an extension of Simons’s current Snowflake-based approach.  It puts Simon on-trend with other CDP vendors who are combining data in the CDP with data held in external systems.

This Twilio Segment report provides an inside-out view of industry trends, based on use of the Segment platform.  Key findings include growth among point solutions and data warehouses as consumers of CDP data, a year-on-year doubling of data deletion requests by consumers, and continued dominance of analytical over personalization applications.  Fun fact: 53% of Twilio Segment customers connect with a data warehouse destination.

Customer data matching expert Lotame has launched Spherical, a “next-generation data platform” that will make it easier for companies to connect their first-party data to other sources for enrichment, modeling, and advertising activation. What’s new here is connectors for CDPs and company data warehouses.

We usually link to company websites when possible, but causaLens has what appears to be an entirely non-functional cookie consent option banner, so I’ll avoid it. Hopefully their “causal AI” tech works better, since they just launched it officially. The promise is to build AI models that identify cause-and-effect relationships and use them to make better business decisions.

The cause-and-effect link between greenhouse gases and global warming is well established, although the contribution of digital advertising seems more questionable. But enough ad-folk worry about it that IAB Tech Lab has launched a Green Supply Path Initiative to help programmatic advertisers measure their impact and, at least as important, show that They Care.

Hi, it’s Jamie, Senior Intern at the CDP Institute Department of the Obvious. The boss won’t be in today – something about gambling debts – so I’m writing the newsletter. We’ll start with this study from Marigold, formerly CM Group, which reports that discounts are the most common reason customers will share their data (93%). Non-obvious findings include: 25% use a privacy-centric alternative browser and 59% will pay more to buy from a preferred brand. Worth a look.

The folks at Edelman Trust Barometer get a special Obvious Perseverance Award for asking the same questions and getting the same answers year after year. Their latest report shows that trust continues its long-term decline, polarization continues to increase, and business remains the most trusted institution. If you prefer non-obvious information, download for details about attitudes in different countries, economic concerns, and how business should address social issues.

This Thoughtworks report gives more insight into business and responsibility. Sadly, the results are not particularly obvious: 73% of senior executives think that responsible technology will eventually be as important as business and financial considerations. Almost as many (67%) have some type of responsible tech guidelines already in place. Who knew?

It’s an odd news day, Dear Reader, with the general items more interesting than the transactions.  To make room, I’ll combine the transactions here.  Social media management vendor Sprout Social has purchased.   AI-based sentimental analysis firm Repustate.  Oro has raised $13 million for its open-source B2B ecommerce platform.  Copilot announced a $10 million Series A to build client portals for service businesses.  Beaconstac has raised $25 million for QR codes, proving everything old is new.

In Big Tech Behaving Badly, we have news that Google will be forced to make major changes to its Android business model in India after losing an anti-trust appeal.  Meanwhile, Twitter’s latest questionable choice is to ban third-party clients .  And Jamie from our Department of the Obvious offers this University of Southern California study finding that the design of Facebook rewards users who spread fake news.

Looking at adtech: we have good news from the UK, where a joint ISBA and PwC study found unattributable programmatic ad spend dropped from 15% to 3% and the portion of revenue actually reaching publishers rose from 51% to 57%, compared with their 2020 study.  Winterberry Group pitches in with its massive, and fascinating, annual report on past and future ad spending. And LUMA offers its own magisterial review of digital media and marketing funding in 2022 (spoiler alert: it was down).