CDP Institute

Just over half of consumers (54%) like to receive personalized messages because they show the consumers are known to the brand, plus they can be time savers. The rest (46%) find it at best unimportant, at worst creepy. Relevance far outstrips personalization when it comes to driving email opens (54% vs. 19%). Takeaway: treat each customer the way they prefer.

Marketers say their top KPIs are long-term ROI and full-funnel ROI, but 70% plan to increase their performance marketing spend and reduce investment in brand building — a tactic that may not support the long-term strategic goals. There have been significant reductions in ad spend in traditional mass channels like TV and radio as dollars shift to digital channels. Nielsen research shows TV leading the way as a long-term ROI multiplier.

M&A deal making in Q1 2024 rose 2% on the previous quarter, Luma Partners reports. Dialogues about deal-making noticeably increased with adtech and digital content leading the way while martech remained depressed. Deals worth $100m+ continued strong from Q4 2023 showing strategic buyers are still interested in quality acquisitions.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.

Move over, Large Language Models: Microsoft thinks a Small Language Model is often a better fit.  They’ve just released something called Phi-3-mini, which can easily run on a smartphone or laptop computer.  This makes custom models cheaper to build and supports applications where a network connection is unavailable.

Security is another reason to build your own custom models.  Cybersecurity firm Riversafe surveyed 250 U.K. CISOs and found that around 20% have had sensitive corporate data leaked through employee use of generative AI.  Without proper controls, data entered into a model like ChatGPT may be visible to other users of the tool.

Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation.  The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.

Salesforce today announced the creation of a Zero Copy Partner Network, including database, data set, and implementation partners.  The network will support Salesforce’s previously-announced Zero Copy initiative, which gives Salesforce products direct access to data stored outside of the Salesforce Data Cloud platform.  There are some performance limits, so this supplements rather than replaces storing core elements within the Data Cloud itself.

HubSpot is bringing AI-powered text, image and audio to creation to Content Hub. It is also adding a tool, Content Remix, that can generate variations for different channels based on one original content asset. Service Hub gets two new AI-powered workspaces for customer service reps and customer success managers.

The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.

Flaws in Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals could allow users’ anonymity to be compromised and permit tracking, says the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office according to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal. Among its responsibilities, the ICO is charged with protecting data privacy. The concerns have been shared with the Competition and Markets Authority which is already scrutinizing Google’s proposals from an antitrust perspective.

International supermarket chain Aldi says it is the first retailer to deploy cashier-free checkout in an existing, full-size store in the U.S. It is implementing Grabango (get it?) checkout-free technology in Aurora, Ill. This comes after Amazon dropped its Just Walk Out technology from large grocery stores, although it will continue to use it in smaller locations.