CDP Institute

Have you been wondering when Amazon Web Services would join Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure in offering generative AI tools? Wonder no more: they announced a collection of services last week that will let developers build AI chatbots and other tools using pretrained models from Anthropic, AI21, Stability AI, and Amazon’s very own Titan family.

Blue badges are the new black: LinkedIn has joined the verification party with a so-far free and voluntary program that offers several ways for members to prove their identity and employer. With programs like this and growing demands for social media to verify young users’ ages and identities, get ready to master the intricacies of identify verification. And start wondering what happens to people who can’t or don’t want to participate.

Here’s the latest twist in the media measurement saga: Nielsen’s flagship National TV Audience Measurement service has been re-accredited by the Media Ratings Council. The service was de-accredited in September 2021, in a move that seemed inconceivable until it happened.

Software companies often have consulting arms, but it’s relatively rare for consultancies to launch a packaged software product. Today’s exception to the rule is Predictable, a suite of plug-and-play predictive models from customer data consultancy Actable. It connects with existing CDPs or cloud data warehouses.

The freedom-at-any-price Republican Party has once again clarified that its concern extends only to freedoms it likes. Since watching TikTok isn’t on the list, the GOP-led Montana legislature just passed a law forbidding residents from using TikTok. The governor is expected to sign shortly.

Fear of TikTok keeping you up at night? Run this list of identity verification stats through a text-to-speech converter and play the output while you’re in bed. The good news: you’ll be snoring in minutes. The bad news: you’ll probably have nightmares.

U.S. Internet ad revenue grew 10.8% last year, less than the pandemic-driven 35.4% of 2021 but far outpacing TV (up 2.0%) and print (down 6%.0), says this PwC/IAB report. Search fell from 42.2% of Internet ad revenue in 2020 to 40.2% in 2022 and social fell from 31.5% to 30.3%. Video more than took up the slack, growing from 18.7% to 22.5%. The report predicts retail media will grow quickly due to its privacy-safe first-party data and closed loop response measurement.

This Digiday survey for Best Buy.Ads offers a more cautious view of retail media prospects. Just 17% of respondents expected the importance of retail media networks to grow significantly in 2023, and the fraction of brands expecting to spend more than 60% of their budget fell from 14% to zero. Half (51%) said retail media were no more effective than other channels.

You’ll recall that earlier this week Google Analytics took away first-click attribution models, which not-coincidentally give less credit than other methods to search ads like Google’s.  Now we have this joint Microsoft-Roku effort that finds that coordinated TV streaming and web ads drive 11% more searches and 10% more clicks.  The methodology is complicated but the results are more realistic.

Cross-channel marketing platform Insider doesn’t call itself a CDP, although it does create unified customer profiles in a distinctly CDP-ish fashion. They’ve just crept even closer with a new Integration Hub which seems mostly focused on sending data from Insider to other systems. They’ve also tightened their two-way integrations with external CDPs including Segment, Tealium, and mParticle.

You can think of ID.me as a mirror image of companies that do identity resolution for marketing: instead of unmasking people who haven’t identified themselves, ID.me verifies that people are who they claim and gives them more control over how their data is shared. They just raised a $132 million Series D , bringing total funding to over $240 million.

The world of media measurement is filled with intrigue and plot twists, although I suspect only insiders follow it in detail. If you happen to be one of them, you may be excited to learn that the Media Rating Council has revoked its accreditation of Comscore’ Media Metrix desktop digital audience measurement service, one of the pillars of the industry. Then again, if you follow it in detail, you probably knew that already.