CDP Institute

Shopify is best of frenemies with Amazon, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing.  Leaning towards the competing side, they’ve launched their own Amazon-style online marketplace, listing all products hosted on Shopify.  There’s a bit of an identity crisis here, since Shop.app asks you to download their app but Shop.app/search lets you search directly from your web browser.

Brand safety is a growing concern as world news gets more miserable.  Google has given advertisers more tools to control where their ads appear by making it easier to select themes to exclude and showing the impact on YouTube and Google Ads audience size of those choices.  Other ad platforms are also bulking up brand safety options, although some work harder than others.

Here a study, there a study, everywhere an AI study.  IDC and Microsoft offer happy ROI news: for every dollar invested, companies report a $3.50 return. Parse.ly finds 67% of companies spend less than $10,000 a year on AI and provides lots of information by industry, company type, and size.  Kaltura reports just 5% of marketers are very worried that AI will make their jobs redundant although 60% of somewhat worried, and has plenty more on AI usage rates, applications, benefits, and concerns.

In case you still haven’t read the memo, streaming digital services are really anxious to show you ads.  The latest to drive home the message is YouTube, which has stepped up its war against ad blockers.  They apparently issued a statement seen only by The Verge, to the effect that their previous anti-ad blocker tests have now gone global and ad-averse users can buy a paid subscription if they want.

One company that’s surely rooting for YouTube to stay ad-friendly is Agentio, which just raised a $4.25 million seed fund for its platform to let digital creators sell ads within their creations on YouTube and elsewhere.  The system gives media buyers a convenient interface to find suitable creators, place ads, and report results.  So far the ad placements are made one creator at a time, although a programmatic approach can’t be too far behind.

Most surveys about cookieless advertising report something between panic and willful ignorance.  But respondents to this ID5 report were eerily calm: 49% were very confident and 32% were somewhat confident in their long-term addressability strategy, and 73% have already adopted at least one solution.  A faith-filled 67% think most of their tech partners are fully prepared for the cookieless future too.

CRM? CMS? MAP?  Hubspot has given up trying to define itself and settled on “customer platform” as its label.  They just confused things a bit further with a deal to acquire Clearbit, which describes itself quite clearly as “a top B2B data provider”.  Clearbit was already available in the HubSpot App Marketplace but it will now be easier for Hubspot clients to enhance their files with data on 20 million companies and 500 million decision-makers. Price was not announced.

Data clean rooms play a growing role in customer data management, so we have to pay attention to them, right?  Clean room vendor Habu just announced quiver of product updates, including orchestration of clean rooms from walled gardens, media, and identity platforms; activation of target audiences across multiple partners; a zero-trust execution environment, and, of course, generative AI-based insights, use cases, and descriptions.

You saw this one coming: bowing to pressure from European privacy regulators, Meta will offer paid subscription, ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram to EU, EEA, and Swiss residents.  Apparently Facebook will still gather their customers’ data but not use it so long as they continue to pay the protection subscription fee.  After all, that’s a nice little profile you have there, my friend, it would be a shame if it were shared without someone you didn’t want to see it.

Treasure Data offered some major product news at its CDP World event last week.  These included real-time ID unification, triggering, and personalization; 20+ prebuilt machine learning models; a generative AI co-pilot to streamline operations and offer insights; and a journey orchestration interface that integrates batch, real-time, and AI capabilities.

It’s not a very fair race, but governments everywhere are doing their best to get ahead of developments in Artificial Intelligence.  Just this week, the U.S. Biden Administration issued an executive order covering a range of safety, privacy, civil rights, labor, innovation, and other issues, while the Group of 7 industrial countries endorsed its own 11-point framework on responsible AI creation and deployment.  As with all regulations, the impact depends on enforcement.

If you need an example of what happens when AI companies operate without supervision, this News/Media Alliance study shows that generative AI model builders have drawn heavily on copyright-protected materials from news, magazine and digital media publishers without consent or compensation.  The study specifically argues that “fair use” exceptions to copyright protections should not apply.