CDP Institute

Meta Threads isn’t the only product aiming to attract Twitter refugees.  Bluesky, a public benefit corporation that says it will make money without advertising and without locking down users’ data, announced an $8 million seed round on Wednesday.  It also revealed its first paid service, an option to buy custom domains to use as Bluesky handles.

While we’re on the topic of responsible marketing, this Dentsu report finds 61% of North American consumers say their purchases are influenced by a brand’s sustainability messages.  Boomers are more likely than other groups to believe national governments are most responsible fore sustainability, but millennials are most likely to say it factors into their votes.  Millennials are also the most hopeful about the sustainability’s impact on the future.

Boomers may be the only marketers who still remember when advertising was targeted by matching it against editorial content.  Nano Interactive is offering essentially that service, although they are describing it as a “library” of “intent personas” that work without cookies or any kind of personal data.  Sounds so much cooler that way.

CDP vendors are more specialized than you may think: 76% focus on one or two industries and 83% focus on clients in a single revenue band, according to this CDP Institute report.  The data comes from our RealCDP audit surveys, so it doesn’t cover everyone in the business.  But it’s still an interesting cross-section.

Meta has launched its Twitter rival, Threads, except in the European Union where it probably violates privacy rules.  It’s possible that Meta will provide a more responsible product than the smoldering remains of Twitter, but that bar is so low an ant could hurdle it.

Users frustrated that ChatGPT Plus includes no information after September 2021 had the option of using a plug-in that let it browse the web through Bing.  Or they did until July 3, when OpenAI disabled the plug-in because users sometimes collected information that was supposed to be kept behind a paywall.  Add it to the list of intellectual property challenges posed training generative AI on more-or-less public data.

We have privacy stories today that are too important to hold for our weekly privacy newsletter. The first is a long-awaited ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union, which rejects Meta’s justifications for processing personal data for advertising without explicit consent. We’ll see how it plays out but this strikes at the heart of Meta’s business model.

A California Superior Court judge has delayed enforcement of the latest set of California Privacy Rights Act regulations until March 2024. The rules were otherwise scheduled to go into effect last weekend. The extension gives businesses a full year to get ready for compliance from the date the regulations were finalized in March 2023.

A tech industry coalition has sued to block Arkansas’s recent law to restrict minors’ use of social media and require age verification by major platforms. NetChoice, whose backers include Amazon, Google, Meta, and others, argues that the law violates First Amendment rights and poses privacy risks.

We somehow got confused over what day the U.S. celebrates the Fourth of July. Since we didn’t publish yesterday in honor of the holiday, we’ll publish today. Let’s start with this $1.3 billion funding for Inflection AI, which offers what it calls a “personal AI”. It’s not clear how that differs from other AIs, which also learn about their users, but they now have lots of money to explain.

The ad world is aflutter at this Adlytics report that advertisers have been misled for years by Google, which claimed falsely that in-stream video ads served by its TrueView product were unskippable.  Google denies the charge. Don’t confuse this scandal with last week’s report that 90% of ads on junk websites are placed by Google Ads, also in violation of stated policy.

Adtech has clearly seen better times.  Pioneering demand-side platform MediaMath files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last Friday, having burned through more than $600 million in financing and leaving over $100 million in debts.  More than 300 people have lost their jobs.