CDP Institute

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.

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.