CDP Institute

Microsoft has released Predictive Targeting for Audience Ads, which appear near articles on sites like MSN and Microsoft Edge. Predictive Targeting matches intent derived from Microsoft’s data on user behaviors with the best available ad assets. As Microsoft puts it, “it eliminates the need for advertisers to create an entire audience targeting strategy from scratch.”

Acryl Data has secured a $21 million Series A for its data governance and observability managed service, which is based on the Acryl-led open-source DataHub Project. The service helps companies build a data catalog, trace data lineage, and manage data quality problems. Those functions usually exist outside of the CDP but are components of the larger data management ecosystem.

Social media is the main news source for many people in Canada and elsewhere. So, when Meta blocks links to legitimate news outlets rather than make payments required under Canada’s just-passed Online News Act, it ensures its members see only the hate, lies, and propaganda that Meta barely pretends to police. Irresponsible? Yes. Despicable? Yes. On-brand? For sure.

“Unnecessarily complex, inefficient and costly ecosystem” could describe pretty much any aspect of adtech.  That particular quote comes from Albertsons Media Collective, which was referring to the retail media world in particular and has just proposed a framework to simplify and standardize it.  Partners include Omnicom Media Group, Pinterest, and R3, and you are probably welcome to join, Dear Reader.

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) is also unhappy, in their case with programmatic media transparency. They issued a report earlier this week that found 23% of the $88 billion in open web programmatic media spend is wasted, including 15% on “made for advertising” websites that offer “low-quality content, such as fake news, conspiracy theories, or spammy links”. Mostly they argue it’s up to advertisers to be more careful.

Attention-based ad buying is one way to help advertisers ensure they are spending money wisely. DoubleVerify, which specializes in media quality and attention data, is upping their game through an alliance with Scibids, which uses AI to optimize programmatic ad buying. Good timing.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has filed charges against Amazon for tricking consumers into joining its Prime program and blocking them from quitting. Prime is a core business-building tool for Amazon, so this could be serious. It’s one more sign of increasingly feisty global tech regulation.

When Adobe agreed last September to pay $20 billion for fast-growing web design platform Figma,  the intent to remove a competitive threat seemed obvious.  (Or not: see this opposing view.)    A rumored U.S. Department of Justice anti-trust suit never appeared but the U.K. authorities opened an investigation in May and we now have reports that EU authorities are considering action as well.  That’s what happens when you feed them meat

More hate speech is a feature, not a bug, on today’s Twitter. So Adobe, Microsoft, and others can’t be surprised to find their ads next to neo-Nazi propaganda. Do they care? Do their customers care? Would the company’s new CEO have taken the job if she cared? So many questions.

We have a gaggle of CDP partnerships today, Dear Reader.  First is a partnership between Lytics and LiveRamp, which will connect customer profiles in Lytics with LiveRamp’s RampID to activate audience segments across many ad channels.  A later stage promises to use LiveRamp’s capabilities to identify website visitors in cookieless environments.

Next we have a deal to give clients of open source ecommerce platform Shopware access to Bloomreach marketing, personalization, and CDP features.  The deal may also extend to Bloomreach helping to sell Shopware outside of Europe.

Finally, Twilio Segment is among several new partners in Databricks’ Delta Sharing project.  Delta Sharing is an open data exchange ecosystem that lets applications read live data from a cloud data lake without copying it. That sort of access is increasingly common among CDP vendors.