CDP Institute

Omnicom has completed the acquisition of cloud-based digital commerce platform Flywheel, which offers retail media management, digital shelf analysis, and competitive intelligence. Global marketing and comms company Omnicom views the acquisition as responsive to increasing customer demands for digital commerce and retail media solutions. The cost of the acquisition (over $800 million) may signal that holding companies are ready to invest in the retail media space.

62% of marketers have positive expectations about the ability of generative AI to boost human creativity, while 55% think it will drive teams to look beyond conventional strategies, according to a December report from Capgemini. The main use cases are expected to be data analysis (90%), search engine optimization (89%), customer services (89%), content creation (88%) and image and video generation (86%). This may be a new year, but this story isn’t going to get old any time soon.

There is direct correlation between an increase in personalised training and positive sales rates and performance — that’s a statement 77% of respondents agreed with in a new survey fielded by LXA in association with Seismic. The international survey of over 200 respondents from B2B organizations also identified budget constraints and data quality and integration as the biggest barriers to achieving sales enablement maturity. The ongoing data challenge is something sales clearly shares in common with marketing.

The New York Times last week filed a federal lawsuit against OpenAI and major investor Microsoft charging them with copyright infringement for using its stories to train the large language model ChatGPT. The Times says OpenAI is threatening its livelihood by stealing its journalists’ work and then using that work to compete with the Times. This is one of a number of copyright infringement suits that could seriously impact the way AI models are trained.

The unceasing controversies surrounding Elon Musk’s stewardship of X, the former Twitter, are prompting brands to reallocate spending — not just to new competitors like Threads and Mastodon, but to the well-established LinkedIn. While LinkedIn commands just 1.5% of the U.S. digital advertising market, the increasing demand for its inventory has seen price increases in the region of 30% in the past year. It’s an ill wind that blows no good.

CX leader NICE has announced the closure of its acquisition of LiveVox, originally announced in October 2023. LiveVox’s AI-driven, automated customer support capabilities will complement NICE’s cloud-native customer experience management platform CXone. Expect to see widespread adoption of AI technologies for customer support and service this year.