CDP Institute

Google continues to refine Topics API, its privacy-protecting ad targeting scheme for the post-third-party-cookie world.  The latest changes add some 280 commercially-focused categories, let advertisers learn a little more about the topics a person has consumed, improve speed, and let people block selected topics in advance.  You’ll note the trend here is to give more information to advertisers, which is another way of saying less privacy to everyone else.

Nearly three-quarters (72%) of CMOs surveyed by London Research for Relay42 said the loss of third-party cookies is a major challenge for their business.  No leading alternative has emerged, but CDP users are seven times more likely (30% vs 4%) to feel they’ll do well in the brave new world.  In fact, CDP users do better at pretty much everything.

You may recall that Meta is dead set against paying publishers whose links appear on its site.  Coincidentally or not, the traffic from Facebook to such links has fallen by half in the past year, according to data from Echobox.  It seems Meta is showing users more videos instead.  All fine, but Reuters Institute reports that more people get news from social media than news sites and Facebook is still the most common social media news source, although its share is rapidly falling.

Three threesomes in a row sounds exhausting, but we’ll give it go.  First we have three items about industry regulation.  The European Parliament has passed its AI Act, which still has several hurdles to clear before it becomes law.  Meanwhile, the industry-backed Partnership for AI announced that Microsoft and Meta have joined its program to set standards to protect media integrity from AI and the Digital Advertising Alliance, an ad industry group, has issued privacy best practices for Internet of Things devices.

Next, three items about carbon-neutral advertising.  Purpose-led ad platform Good-Loop has launched a tool that lets advertisers screen out impressions about a CO2 per impression threshold.   Ad exchange Sharethrough is removing high-carbon “made for advertising” sites   by default and offering low-emission private marketplaces. And Scope3 has signed up Microsoft Advertising, Amobee, MediaMath, Basis, and Undertone to offer inventory segments that exclude high-emissions inventory.

Finally, attention-based ad buying.  Yahoo is using Adelaide’s attention predictions to sell high-attention prebid segments. Outbrain is also using Adelaide data to power its Onyx platform for brand building campaigns.    Ad exposure expert Double Verify is partnering with TVision, which uses an in-home sensor to watch (consenting) people watch TV, to add attention to its campaign analytics.  TVision also has deals with Cadent, Lumen, and the ever-present Adelaide.

mParticle has a new pricing model that charges different amounts depending on how data is used and stored and on which system features are employed.  It’s a departure from the usual CDP approach of charging based on the number of user profiles, but calling it “revolutionary” might be a bit much.  Think of it as part of the industry trend to offer CDP functions as separate components.

Data management tech vendor Informatica has always sold a basket of products, so unbundled pricing is their natural state.  They’ve just announced plans to add data security and privacy vendor Privatar to the collection.  Price wasn’t announced and expected close is before October.

The European Union continues to fill the global vacuum in tech regulation.  The latest step is a warning to Google that the EU plans to force it to break up parts of its advertising business to prevent continued abuses of its dominant position.  There are similar anti-trust actions in the U.S. but they are moving slowly.

We’ve written a lot about this-or-that media company partnering with that-or-this retailer to help marketers measure advertising results. The random pairings are being replaced by more comprehensive solutions. The latest deal  makes comprehensive consumer purchase data from Affinity Solutions available to anyone with access to the Snowflake Marketplace.

Marketers are also eager to understand what happens on the customer journey in between an ad impression and a purchase. CallRail fills in some blanks by tracking telephone call data. They’ve just integrated with Adobe Analytics to link that information with online interactions, enabling more effective multi-channel attribution.

What about Bloomreach, you ask? They also have a new friend, partnering with Contentsquare to feed insights based on digital behaviors to Bloomreach’s customer engagement platform. Bloomreach will also push information from its CDP back to Contentsquare because that’s what friends are for.