CDP Institute

Despite an apparent consensus that “Made for Advertising” sites provide a poor user experience and are damaging to the reputation of digital (and especially programmatic) advertising, Amazon and other major DSPs are still serving ads on MFA sites according to research by Adalytics. Supply sources are still full of “garbage inventory.” The ANA recommends advertisers become more active stewards of their media investments.

Proximic by Comscore’s natural language processing engine and AI contextual categorization technology will deliver to Epsilon insights into content including brand suitability and inventory quality in a new partnership. The contextual classifications will be used by Epsilon Digital, the company’s adtech platform. Contextual data is seen as increasingly valuable in an ad eco-system no longer supported by cookie-like tracking signals.

TikTok will be upgrading its Creator portal to the Creator Academy providing extensive education resources about the platform. This will focus on teaching creators about monetization opportunities. Reflecting TikTok’s international market, the Academy will initially be available in seven languages with more to come.

Management teams are almost twice as concerned about the lack of infrastructure for AI technology development than CEOs (32% vs. 17%) according to a survey of over 160 corporate retail employees. One third of management teams worry about the impact of AI on the workforce compared with 21% of CEOs. Strikingly, 90% of all those surveyed claimed to know how AI works in retail.

Businesses are bullish about disrupting their industries with AI with 78% considering it a competitive opportunity. However, fewer than 30% believe their IT teams have the key capabilities for rapid adoption. This is based on a poll of 300 C-suite, VPs or directors conducted by MIT Technology Insights in collaboration with telco company Telstra.

Eighty-five per cent of organizations are investing in AI technology, 72% of CIOs are “apprehensive” about regulating AI internally and 86% have Implemented formal AI Policies. AI is regareded as the number one priority for 2024, although CIOs are also thinking about cybersecurity and sustainability. Digital services company Logicalis interviewed 1,000 CIOs globally for the tenth edition of their CIO report.

Measuring ad performance was never easy, but privacy-related data restrictions and fragmented media channels have made it much harder than ever.  Google is offering Meridian, an open-source media mix modeling system that won’t be as precise as cookie-based measurement but does promise to draw a meaningful big picture.  It’s in limited release now with plans to offer it to everyone “coming soon”.

Post-cookie measurement is on the minds of Topsort, a retail media adtech startup that just raised a $20 million Series A.  The company offers a retail media tech stack, data clean room, and retailer ad network.  They’re especially proud of their AI-driven ad bidding engine.

Location data raises plenty of privacy issues but Placer.ai sidesteps them by selling aggregated traffic information.  They have just expanded their partnership with retail analytics giant dunnhumby, which will use the information to build a unified picture of in-store and out-of-store customer journeys.

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), aimed to curbing the market power of the biggest tech companies, came into force earlier this week.  Google announced several product changes to comply, including making it easier to find shopping comparison sites, offering more search engine and browser choices for Android phones; and adding new consent options. Most changes will only apply to users within the EU.

Google isn’t the only company making changes in response to DMA.  TikTok has launched a Data Portability API allowing registered developers to request permission to transfer user data and has improved the functionality of its Download Your Data tool for personal and business users. TikTok will also create a web form for business users to provide feedback on DMA-related features.

As more video advertising is delivered outside of TV screens, marketers find themselves wrestling with increasingly fragmented campaign reporting.  Comscore is providing some help by expanding its YouTube campaign ratings to include YouTube Shorts and in-feed inventory. Marketers will also be able to cross-measure standard video inventory on YouTube and YouTube TV across CTV, desktop and mobile devices.