CDP Institute

It’s debatable whether any enhancement to a generative AI product is worth singling out as news, given how many happen each day.  But that Adobe Firefly now supports prompts in over 100 languages, and will be localized in 20 languages, seems worth a nod.  Let’s also note that Adobe is paying more attention than most to clarifying the source of content that Firefly creates – a shamefully rare example of responsible Big Tech behavior.

Oh, Canada.😞 This Angus Reid Institute survey finds that 48% of Canadians think the government should “back down” on making Big Tech companies pay for news links while just 26% think it should “stand firm” – even though 61% agree that Big Tech should pay up.  On the other hand, it seems that Microsoft is planning to comply and there is some talk about Canadians shifting searches to Bing.

The on-going Twitter train wreck, now with extra drama from Threads, is another story we can’t cover in any depth.  Some developments you may have missed: Website Planet found Threads posts get more engagement than posts on Twitter; an Ipsos poll found 58% of Americans who use Twitter have tried Threads or are likely to; and, in a characteristically childish and incompetent move, Twitter has made an ineffectual attempt at blocking links to Threads.

Are CDPs replacing DMPs?  Perhaps, but slowly: 36% of respondents to this Piano survey reported they use their CDP as a DMP, a figure that’s still far behind standalone DMPs (53%), audience management systems (50%) and DMP integrated with a supply side or demand side platform (43%).  Lots of juicy details here on data collection goals, growth in spending on data unification and on the revenue it creates, and data quality as the biggest collection challenge.

This study on data management is by Forrester for Zeta Global.  It also highlights data quality challenges: only half the respondents are confident in their data quality, security, reliability, and activation.  The thrust of the report is that companies have lots of systems impacting customer experience (84% have more than eleven), so poor integration among “best of breed” systems causes all kinds of problems.

Customer success platform Gainsight was among the firms we originally tagged as CDPs a decade ago. They don’t call themselves that anymore, although they probably still qualify.  Still, it’s rare to see even a borderline CDP make an acquisition, so let’s note that they just purchased learning management vendor Northpass.

Google and Meta may be willing to block news in Canada rather than pay the sites that create it, but blocking news in California would be a much bigger deal.  So you can bet their lobbyists were hard at work to slow down progress of the California Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which passed the state assembly in June.  Their efforts have succeeded: state senate action on the bill has been delayed until next year.

IAB Tech Lab has released a “stable” specification for its privacy audience activation standard and guidance for its data clean room standard.  Both are aimed at making it easier to share data between different data clean rooms, a key industry goal in making customer data available in a privacy-protected way.

Maybe marketers have finally started to grasp how little interest consumers have in personalized product recommendations.  This RIS News study of grocery tech trends found that while consumers ranked personalized recommendations dead last (seventh out of seven), retailers ranked it fifth out of seven.  Discounts headed the list for both groups.  But there’s still a misalignment: 13% of consumers wanted personalized recommendations, while 48% of retailers thought they did.

Italy-based Neodata Group and Adabra have merged to become Blendee. The firm will offer a combined “marketing operating system” that combines the Adabra Customer Data Platform with Neodata’s Adagio ad server and Exaudi Data Management Platform. The company also announced €6 million in new funding.

Customer experience has dropped from first to third place on the priority list of CEOs, according to this IBM survey. The new top priority is productivity or profitability, up from sixth place in 2022. Most of the survey focuses on generative AI, which 50% of CEOs say they’ve already deployed even though just 29% of their executive teams say they have the in-house expertise to do it.

Drilling down a level in the organization, Intercom finds that 67% of customer support leaders feel customers are ready to interact with an AI chatbot although just 45% of support teams agree. In fact, 53% of support teams are worried that AI will have a negative impact on the customer service industry, while 71% of leaders believe the impact will be positive.