CDP Institute

Anyone who’s tried to pry an iPhone from the fingers of its owner knows that Apple and Android serve very separate markets.  That wasn’t clear to the judge in Epic Games’ app store monopoly suit against Apple two years ago, but a jury saw things differently yesterday in Epic’s parallel suit against Google’s Play Store.  Google will appeal the decision, of course, but it seems that alternative payment options are only a matter of time.

This survey from Merge, which sells product integration tools, highlights the challenges of working outside an app store to build integrations on your own. It found 68% of companies have built fewer than 10 integrations with customer-facing systems, even though they’d like many more. CRM and marketing automation integrations are the most common, and home-built integrations often face problems with performance, scalability and long-term maintenance.

We’ll just tuck in this unpleasant economic news, because, really, who needs it? Communications agency 10Fold reports that 79% of the B2B tech companies they surveyed report moderate to severe revenue impact due to economic conditions in 2023. One the bright side, 75% plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2024.

The European Union Parliament and Council last week reached agreement on a comprehensive set of rules for AI development.  The rules ban several applications, such as scraping of facial images from public sources, and impose obligations on developers of high-risk systems.  Formal votes are still required in both Parliament and Council for the rules to become law.

The EU Court of Justice was especially feisty last week, issuing several rules that put new constraints on credit agencies.  Most significantly, the Court determined that calculated credit scores are automated decision making, which GDPR prohibits without user consent. The Court also limited data retention and gave national courts the right to review decisions by national data protection authorities, which have often been notably lax in their enforcement efforts.

Free Press is an activist organization dedicated to individual and press freedoms, so you won’t be surprised that they’re highly critical of how social media platforms are handling misinformation.   Still, this study provides a good overview of the many ways those platforms have failed to act responsibly in the past year.  They offer suggestions for how the platforms and government can make things better, although the chances for adoption are slim.

The meaning of “Composable CDP” depends mostly on what the person using it is trying to sell you, but Composable Commerce has a clearer definition, backed by standards of the vendor-neutral MACH Alliance.  Bloomreach, the only CDP that’s also a MACH member, just partnered with commerce platform Spryker to make Spryker functions more accessible to Bloomreach personalization and search.  Consider it a reminder that connecting one composable system to another is not entirely effortless.

Composability plays a starring role in Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma’s latest analysis of the martech universe.   While other observers regularly predict a consolidation that still hasn’t come, Brinker and Riemersma remain bullish on industry growth.  This report from digital analytics vendor Heap supports their view: 40% of respondents are using more tools in their tech stack this year while just 22% are using fewer.  Budgets are up at 32% and down at just 16%.

Consolidation does happen.  App analytics vendor AppsFlyer just bought oolo, a user acquisition platform that analyzes live app data to forecast campaign performance and identify opportunities.  The deal comes just one month after AppsFlyer bought app analytics provider devtodev.    Both products will help to populate AppsFlyer’s new Privacy Cloud Marketplace.

If you wonder why we write about so many obscure ad audience products, it’s to show how the industry is struggling to solve the loss of data from third party cookies and mobile devices.  Today’s entry comes from adtech firm VideoAmp, which is launching a solution that commingles identity data from multiple suppliers to build larger audiences than any one source can provide.  The mingling happens in VideoAmp’s data clean room, so proprietary information is not exposed.

While most audience builders try to capture as many people as possible, Genius Sports is moving in the other direction by focusing on sports fans only.  They’ve just launched FanHubID, which uses sports-related online and offline signals to build the most detailed sport fan-related profiles it can.  We can only assume that sports marketers are cheering wildly, and speculate on their mascot.

Blueprint is a new Yahoo product that combines two sets of its own data: first-party behavioral data from Yahoo’s own sites and purchase and location data from logged-in users with a Yahoo email address.  The goal here isn’t to build audiences, but to help advertisers optimize their campaigns as they execute.  There’s AI involved but it’s not autonomous: the system only offers recommendations on how to meet specified targets.