CDP Institute

Medallia, the customer and employee experience platform, has launched four new AI tools. These include Ask Athena, a chatbot trained on an organization’s experience and other data, and Intelligent Summaries, producing AI-generated briefs on interactions, customer profiles and issue resolution. Medallia has also established an internal AI Moderation Council to support ethical, responsible, and inclusive use of AI.

CG companies are focused on increasing margins with 90% expecting profitable growth over the next two years, says Salesforce in its “Consumer Goods Industry Insight” report. They are also investing in digital marketing, with social media being the number one channel, as well as digital service and D2C sales. The industry is effective at collecting data (the number of sources has almost doubled since 2021), but less effective at activating it.

Skai, the omnichannel marketing platform (formerly Kenshoo) reports that 77% of marketers surveyed for their “State of Retail Media” report saw good to excellent results from retail media. Only 3% saw poor results and none said results were terrible. Interestingly, the report found brands and agencies misaligned, with brands seeking online/offline retail opportunities while agencies manage retail media like just another channel.

Fewer topics are buzzier these days than Composable CDPs, and the CDP Institute is adding its little kazoo with a Composable CDP Knowledge Hub, featuring a Self-Assessment Tool to help members determine which features to look for to create a complete solution.  There’s also a vendor-neutral, Institute-written paper with an overview of the topic, links to our Build vs. Buy vs Compose training course, and other goodies.  Did we mention that it’s all free?

A report from IAB Tech Lab warns that implementing Google’s Privacy Sandbox solutions will require a significant and expensive reworking of the digital advertising ecosystem. Privacy Sandbox has been developing alternatives to third-party cookie tracking, such as Google Topics. Google claims the report contains errors, inaccuracies and incomplete information.

Shortly after Meta announced that it will label as AI-generated images created using Imagine, OpenAI announced similar capabilities for its ChatGPT and DALL-E 3. Metadata tagging will allow anyone to see that images were created by AI. The change is immediate for the web and will be introduced for apps by February 12.

Digital engagement platform Zappix is launching an enhanced version of its Digital Outreach product including upgraded CDP capabilities. This will see greater flexibility in permitted data structures and integration of more third-party systems. The iteration also includes improvements to email editing and analytics.

Adtech platform Viant has announced the addition of AI-powered solutions to its Viant Data Platform. One of these, Chat With Data, leverages generative AI to analyze campaign performance using natural language prompts. AI will also be used to make it easier for programmatic advertisers and marketers to onboard CDPs with data clean rooms.

Zoominfo, the platform that helps B2B sales teams find and engage with customers, is adding an AI copilot to its offering. The copilot will apply generative AI to the platforms extensive go-to-market and CRM data to surface recommendations on who to contact, when to contact them and what to say. It also has an AI Email Assistant to generate effective customer communications.

The Competition & Markets Authority, a U.K. government department, reiterated in a new report that Google cannot proceed with third-party cookie deprecation until competition concerns are resolved. In particular, the CMA says that the Privacy Sandbox must not be used to reinforce the existing market position of Google ads. It’s not clear how the CMA’s position impacts Google’s earlier move to allow 300 million global users to disable cookies.

Almost half of consumers will share data with brands on their own terms, according to a survey of 1,500 U.S. consumers by consumer research platform Attest. No fewer than 84% shared concerns about data privacy, while many were ready to opt out of mailing lists and decline non-essential cookies. Attest sees big opportunities here for zero-party data, information that consumers actively and willingly share.

In a wide-ranging report, growth consultancy Winterberry Group identifies composable data layer architecture as a possible trend for 2024 with the market moving away from monolithic marketing suites. Composability allows marketers to assemble, disassemble, and reassemble technology components to meet evolving needs. Two major challenges that will continue to confront marketers this year: data quality and the need to integrate data from disparate sources.