CDP Institute

ChatGPT has been criticized for exposing information provided in user prompts, including some that’s confidential. They’ve just added a feature that lets users stop this from happening by blocking the system from using chat history to train itself. Another new feature lets users export and review data that ChatGPT has stored about their interactions.

If you think ChatGPT will have a big impact in the future, you’re wrong: it’s already happened. Sixty percent of respondents to this survey from education website Intelligent reported they know someone who has lost their job to AI, and 57% fear losing their own job. Ten percent have completed a ChatGPT course and 30% plan to take one before the year is out.

It’s hard to believe ChatGPT could be having so big an impact so quickly. But this research from OpenAI itself concludes that 80% of the U.S. workforce will have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by generative AI, and 19% will see 50% or more of their tasks affected. Even closer to home, Beantown Media Ventures found 29% of content marketers think AI will replace all writers in the next five years and another 40% think it will replace junior writers.

Airship has just released the “world’s first no-code native app experience editor”. Exactly how this differs from other no-code experience editors is not clear but, judging by the press release, the folks at Airship are super-excited about it. Apparently, marketers and product owners now have so much power that sparks fly from their fingertips.

Dust off that Walkman and pop in a Bee Gees cassette: Firstlogic, whose tech was cutting edge when disco was king, is replacing its venerable Match/Consolidate software with Match IQ, which they promise “goes well beyond the typical ‘merge/purge’ operation.” That’s a term I haven’t heard since my last trip to Danceteria.

If your musical reference point is closer to the Andrews Sisters, you may be nostalgic for the days when A.C. Nielsen’s radio and TV ratings were the Next Big Thing. Nielsen is still around, of course, and their 2023 Annual Marketing Report contains interesting data on channel spend and effectiveness. The headline that caught my eye was “Investment in martech is declining”, which is a bit misleading: planned spend is down at 24% of companies but up at 56%.

How big a problem is zombie martech? Half (51%) of the respondents to this Demand Metric survey for Integrate said they have a great or very great amount of redundant or unused tech. But they don’t seem too worried about it: 64% said their current martech stack supports them well or very well, 44% plan to increase their marketing ops and martech spending, and more plan to add new systems (32%) than to make their stack smaller (26%). Interesting.

One hidden cost of unused martech is the effort that went into installing and integrating it. This Digibee study of large enterprises found that 16% to 25% of IT spend goes to integration, and half the companies rebuild six or more integrations each year. Worse still, 79% of those new integrations cause significant downtime, which can easily cost more than $1 million per hour.

Tech budgets increase pretty much no matter what, but spend on creative is more volatile. Lions Advisory found that 53% of brands expect to reduce creative investment this year, while just 17% expect an increase. They’re blaming the prospect of recession, not AI, in case you’re wondering.

Apple’s initial courtroom victory over Epic Games’ challenge to its app store payment policies was largely reaffirmed in an Appeals Court ruling, The court apparently concluded that requiring apps to pay Apple a hefty commission isn’t monopolistic because people can always switch to Android if they object. People chose phones largely for their app store payment rules, right?

Anti-trust rules are tougher outside the U.S. Google Play Store has been required by both EU and UK regulators to allow alternative payment options for in-app purchases. Google resisted, of course, but they ultimately have to comply. They just released a proposal for doing that in the UK. App owners will be incented to favor the Google payment system but aren’t required to use it.

Outbrain is a native advertising platform, which means it posts those click-baity stories crowding the margins of many web sites. They’ve just partnered with Assertive Yield, which analyzes the revenue those stories generate. The deal will let Outbrain’s clients optimize their content selections based on real-time performance. It’s one more example of combining data from two sources to tie ads to results.