CDP Institute

It seems like just last week that we wrote about AI-related announcements at the Google I/O conference, but it was really two weeks.  So writing about  yesterday’s Google Marketing Live isn’t repetitive at all.  There were more AI-related announcements, include a chat-based interface to set up Google Ads campaigns, AI-generated assets for Performance Max display campaigns, and AI-generated search ads.

Microsoft kicked off its Build conference for developers yesterday.  The focus wasn’t on marketing but there was still a lot of relevant news, including use of Bing as the default search engine for ChatGPT, chat interface-driven tools for website building and app creation, and still more chat-driven data preparation, cleaning, and analysis.  It seems the next step beyond low-code development is voice-based coding, or vo-code.

Meta has its own AI news, including release of open source text-to-speech and speech-to-text models support more than 1,100 languages.   But mostly they’ve trying get their business in order.  They took another step in that direction yesterday by selling GIPHY, which they bought for $400 million in 2020 but couldn’t keep due to anti-trust issues.  Buyer was Shutterstock, which paid $53 million.

It’s barely one year since Meta closed its $1 billion acquisition of the Kustomer CRM platform, which had been delayed since 2020 due to regulatory reviews.  But Meta’s fortunes have changed since then and, like a family that bought a boat they couldn’t afford, they’ve now sold it back to the original owners for a fraction of what they paid.  They did keep a minority stake.

Knowing who to trust is trickier than ever, and don’t get me started on fake news from blue checks at Twitter.  The folks at LinkedIn are considerably more sensible.  They’ve expanded their employment verification feature to job postings, ensuring that listings are made by someone who actually works at the company they claim.

Amazon’s palm-scanning technology offers highly reliable verification, although the price includes some hefty privacy concerns.  They’ve just added age verification, so members can buy age-restricted items like alcohol without showing other ID.  Retailers only see a message like “21+”, which is a good approach – so long as you trust Amazon not to do anything else with the information it’s collecting.

This CMO Council report for Sprinklr takes a gloomy position: the headline is 66/% of marketers lack confidence in their ability to meet revenue goals, although that includes 39% who are moderately confident. More cheerfully, 36% are increasing their martech budget for 2023 compared with 25% planning to cut it. Back on the dark side: just 23% say they have a very effective relationship with IT and just 19% strongly agree they can convince their CFO to not cut the marketing budget.

Most marketers (60%) think consumer concerns about tracking technology could hurt their brand reputation and the same fraction agree user tracking will soon be obsolete, according to this global IDC study for Ogury. Despite this, 41% remain moderately or not at all familiar with cookieless alternatives. Ignorance may be bliss: 61% are confident they’ll be able to reach audiences at scale in the future.

While awareness of cookieless alternatives is interesting, the more important question is how many marketers are actually using them. This report by 33Across, which provides cookieless programmatic infrastructure, trumpets news that cooklieless ad CPMs average 21% less than cookie-based CPMs. They are more coy about revenue share, giving industry-by-industry details but no total. My math, which could be wrong, puts the figure about 23% for Q1 2023, maybe up 2% from the quarter before.

Here’s a dog that didn’t bark: Google’s list of 180 countries where its Bard chatbot will now be available doesn’t include any member of the European Union or Canada. Could be they are worried about privacy issues. Maybe people in places with fewer privacy protections should think about that.

You can add Montana to your list of places that care deeply about privacy: they’ve just made it illegal to distribute (but not use) TikTok for exactly that reason. Then again, the just-signed law doesn’t ban any other data-grabbing application. So apparently it’s okay to take Montanans’ data so long as you’re not Chinese.

Data collection is a fundamental building block of customer data management and one of the main bottlenecks. Data integration tool vendor Airbyte has launched a no-code connector builder that it says can reduce the time to build a new connector from several days to under five minutes. It requires a JSON-based HTTP API – and if you don’t know what that is, comrade developer, you probably shouldn’t be using it.