CDP Institute

Google has joined Meta in blocking news links on its Canadian sites, rather than pay publishers as now required by law. The company was less confrontational than Meta in their language, and probably does a better job of blocking misinformation. But the effect is still to make it harder for Canadians to receive reliable news.

How ever offended the tech giants are at the effrontery of payment demands from local news sites, blocking those sites does diminish the value provided to consumers. That’s not necessarily the best move when 77% of UK and Nordics respondents to this Precis Digital survey are already concerned about how social platforms use their data, and 57% see no benefit in sharing data with brands. Just 7% would trade more data for more relevant and personalized ads, compared with 35% who prefer no data sharing and irrelevant ads. Another 41%... Read More >

This Consensys study of global consumers mostly offers good news about crypto and Web3. But it also reports interesting attitudes towards personal data: 50% say they add value to the internet, 67% say they should own things they make on the internet, and 70% think they should share in the profit a company earns from their data. Results are broken out for 15 countries.

Salesforce has spawned thousands of applications that work on its platform.  The folks are Unaris argue that many are undercapitalized and poorly managed.  They just raised $35 million to buy and strengthen a select few.

Bored with retail media and connected TV?  You can shift your trend-hunting antennae to in-game advertising, which is gaining increasing attention as media channel.  Anzu, which offers programmatic in-game ad placements to game developers, just added $48 million Series B to hurry things along.

The ANA recently estimated that global advertisers waste at least $14 billion year on websites that post unoriginal, low-quality content so they can sell programmatic advertising. News rating service NewsGuard sees the same problem, although they peg the annual waste at $2.6 billion. A separate NewsGuard study found ads on such sites from 141 major brands, with more than 90% served by Google Ads despite Google’s claim to avoid them.

RudderStack has launched a feature to build unified customer profiles in a Snowflake data warehouse.  The new feature, called, um, Profiles, builds an identity graph and uses it to assemble a customer data table that can include user-defined attributes such as lifetime purchases and last interaction date.  It joins Rudderstack’s existing tools for data collection and distribution to create what’s effectively an integrated CDP.  The main difference from a conventional CDP is the same Snowflake instance could contain non-CDP data.

Snowflake’s annual user conference is under way, so we have a blizzard (sorry not sorry) of announcements from and about them.  I’ll just highlight private previews of a new Large Language Model, based on last year’s Applica acquisition.  It will focus on making unstructured data more usable, and thus encouraging companies to store more of it in Snowflake.

Alliances between ad platforms and retail sales measurement vendors have become so common I may stop writing about them.  They were originally worth noting because they’re one way that marketers adjust to the loss of data from third-party cookies.  Before dropping the veil of silence, I’ll mention that self-serve programmatic ad platform StackAdapt now gives its clients access to retail foot traffic data from Precisely PlaceIQ.

We don’t usually bother to write about companies buying AI vendors, since it happens pretty much every day.  But it’s rare that the buyer is a data tech company like Databricks.  They just bought AI platform MosaicML for $1.3 billion.  Not bad for a two year old company with 76 employees and $37 million in funding.

You don’ t need to be told that AI is a hot topic among marketers, with 92% planning to adopt it and 44% planning to adopt it quickly, according to this Optimizely survey.  What’s interesting is the same survey finds that marketers are doing a terrible job of integrating the tech they already own, with 76% skeptical that their martech will generate the ROI they want. Even more interesting, just 9% of companies with fewer than 20 martech tools doubt they’ll get the expected ROI, compared with 57% of those... Read More >

One of our favorite story lines is that marketers think they’re doing a better job than their customers do.  This SurveyMonkey report makes the familiar point: 86% of CX and digital marketing pros said they consistently deliver a personalized experience but just 8% of consumers agreed.  Here’s a new twist: 63% of pros think AI will improve CX but just 25% of consumers agree.  In fact, 32% of consumers think AI will make CX worse.