CDP Institute

We haven’t written much about Adobe’s entry in the generative AI footrace because their main focus has been Firefly, a tool for creative departments.  But they made a splash last week with an announcement that they’ll indemnify Firefly users against claims of copyright infringement, which is a big concern.  The news was probably over-hyped; Adobe’s actual announcement is carefully circumscribed: “enterprises also have the opportunity to obtain an IP indemnity from Adobe for content generated by certain Firefly-powered workflows.”

“Hype” and “AI” just naturally go together.   AI-based copy generator Jasper.ai appeared to promise its latest tool could create a complete marketing campaign from scratch.  A closer look finds the scope is more modest: the system can generate a campaign brief and copy for various channels.  It’s not clear how far it gets into images and it certainly doesn’t generate lists or buy media.

This B2B marketer survey from LinkedIn has plenty about AI.  But I was more intrigued to see that marketers listed tech and analytics as the second most important skill today, behind creative strategy and execution, (53% vs 59%) and actually forecast it would be more important than creative in the future (49% vs 41%).  On the other hand, LinkedIn found they’d been adding more creative skills to their LinkedIn profiles than ever.  Lots more here.

Adobe is extending its Real Time CDP to support new data partners, look-alike audiences, and import audience segments from other systems.  The announcements came at the company’s EMEA Summit.  There were plenty of announcements about the company’s other Experience Cloud products, and of course new features powered by generative AI.

Do marketers have too much tech?  This Capterra study of SMB marketers finds only 62% of apps are used regularly.  While 84% say their companies conduct regular software audits, just 34% limit non-IT employees’ ability to add new software.

Even if you ignore the more apocalyptic warnings about AI, there are plenty of issues to consider and industry groups are stepping up.  Publisher-backed trade group Digital Content Next just issued  seven principles – more of a guideline, really – to help protect creators’ rights.  Meanwhile, Publicis Group just became the first agency holding company to join the Coalition for Content Provenance Authenticity (C2PA), which is not to be confused with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Salesforce kicked off its big Connections conference yesterday, and if you’re surprised the focus was on generative AI, you haven’t been paying attention.  Still, the focus this time was on marketing applications that draw on Salesforce CDP data, so it’s right up our alley.  They also announced direct access to Google BigQuery data, ticking the “zero-copy” box as well.

Simon Data is a CDP that’s built on the Snowflake cloud database, which you might have thought they were in the “zero copy” camp already.  You would have been wrong until yesterday, when they announced a “connected segmentation feature” that reads a Snowflake warehouse directly.  It still requires mapping the Snowflake tables to a Simon schema and assumes the warehouse has tables coded with unique customer IDs, which most do not.

The Trade Desk is trying to set itself up as a platform at the center of a non-walled-garden adtech ecosystem, which is a tall order with potentially tall rewards.  They climbed a couple of steps on Monday by adding integrations with purchase data from Albertsons, Walgreens, and others; new indices to measure TV audience quality and reach; and a partner portal to simplify integrations with other adtech products.  They also added a bunch of AI-driven features to simplify programmatic media buying, but you’d expect that.