CDP Institute

Ad Fontes Media, a company that rates news sites for reliability and bias, has announced the integration of its rating data with The Trade Desk’s programmatic advertising platform. This will allow the screening out of highly partisan, AI-generated and clickbait sites, preferentially serving ads to sites containing quality journalism. Directing ad spend to low quality sites not only wastes dollars and threatens brand safety but de-monetizes quality news operations.

Although on-site advertising will remain the central retail media strategy, off-site advertising will play a larger role in 2024. About a third of advertisers plan to shift funds into off-site advertising — including display, online video, CTV and social — in the next twelve months. Retail media will be the fastest-growing ad channel in the US in 2024 according to an October 2023 eMarketer forecast.

The last non-direct click method used by Google Analytics makes it hard to prove the impact of paid social. Similarly, pixel-based click metrics at top of funnel no longer provide an adequate view of impact. Fospha, a measurement platform for ecommerce, advocates combining multi-touch attribution with marketing mix modeling to understand effectiveness of ad spend.

Gartner has finally released a Magic Quadrant for CDPs.  Always skeptical about CDPs, Gartner positions them as a marketing tool and then questions whether CDPs can survive as customer data is used by other departments.

AI means that predictive customer insights can be surfaced faster and are more nuanced than in the past according to Twilio’s fifth annual Customer Data Platform Report. Twilio Segment has added well over 400 predictive traits (so far) to its platform. The report also notes the increased popularity of data warehouses as a destination category.

Adobe has released a new AI Assistant in beta for Reader and Acrobat. It will support the use of conversational AI in pdfs with the ability to generate summaries, unlock insights and answer questions about the three trillion documents worldwide stored in the is format. There will be an add-on subscription plan once AI Assistant is out of beta.

Salesforce is offering a free version of its CDP-esq Data Cloud to Sales and Service Cloud customers, with the apparent goal of increasing use of Marketing Cloud.  The Data Cloud offers Marketing Cloud users a unified view of data in Salesforce clouds and other systems via no-copy access to cloud databases and Mulesoft connectors.  The company also unveiled a small business edition of Marketing Cloud.

Walmart has agreed to acquire VIZIO and its SmartCast Operating System for approximately $2.3 billion. The acquisition should accelerate Walmart’s media business, Walmart Connect, allowing it access to VIZIO’s CTV advertising solutions. VIZIO’s device eco-system featuring the SmartCast OS boasts 18 million accounts, a growth of around 400% since 2018.

The European Union has announced a formal investigation into TikTok over allegations that it has breached obligations to protect minors. Specific problems cited by an E.U. official include “addictive design and screen time limits, rabbit hole effect, age verification, default privacy settings.” TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, could be fined up to 6% of its global turnover if found in breach of the Digital Services Act.

Meltwater, a provider of media, social and consumer intelligence, announced it is partnering with Microsoft on an integrated communications insights solution. The partnership will integrate the data from Meltwater’s listening tools with Microsoft’s AI-driven capability to deliver data “as dialogue.” Microsoft will use Meltwater as its provider of global intelligence, while Meltwater has made a multi-year commitment to Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform.

Meta announced that businesses purchasing boosts for their posts on the iOS versions of Facebook and Instagram will need to pay a 30% service charge to Apple. Meta represented this as required by Apple guidelines. However, Meta did confirm that boosting posts on browser versions of its social media sites will avoid the fee.

Less than a fifth of customer support teams say their tools always meet their needs, according to a survey of over 2,000 customer support professionals. Three quarters of C-level support leaders say they’re always looking for new platforms, tools, and technologies, while 65% of executives and leaders are looking at new technologies because of AI. The biggest barriers to implementing new solutions are resistance to change and budget restraints.