CDP Institute

Measuring video audiences is a huge challenge for advertisers.  Comscore has simplified things a bit by expanding its partnership with YouTube beyond CTV to include video ad measurement on desktop, mobile browsers and mobile apps. The service is initially available in the U.S. but other countries will be able to see total YouTube audiences in 2025.

It’s tough for smaller agencies to deal with the ever-growing complexities of video and other programmatic digital advertising. Pathlabs makes it easier by helping midsize independent agencies to plan and report on paid ad campaigns.  They were just purchased by global programmatic agency MiQ, which expects Pathlabs to help it grow beyond serving big holding companies.

Looking for the right service provider to support your CDP project? The CDP Institute has just published its first Service Providers Report.  A one-page matrix lets you find vendors with the perfect mix of industry expertise, company size, client types, services, local presence, and more.

The practice of “hashing” email addresses, phone numbers or other identifiers does not guarantee anonymity, the Federal Trade Commission has warned. While hashing creates a numerical value that obscures identity, it can still be used to track an individual or device over time. Companies should not claim otherwise, the agency said.

Speedy food delivery brand Gopuff has joined the retail media space, launching an inhouse ads platform. Drawing on ten years of consumer data, Gopuff can surface target audiences and bid optimization based on shopping behavior, previous purchases, time of day and many other data points. Using AI, the platform is even faster than the delivery service.

Between 2019 and 2023, suspected digital fraud grew 105%, outpacing digital transactions which grew 90% according to a new report from TransUnion. By the end of 2023, lenders were facing over $3 billion exposure through the use of fake or synthetic identities for credit cards, auto loans and personal loans. Over 50% of consumers in 18 select countries and regions reported being targeted with fraud attempts, just between September and December 2023.

With the announcement of SearchGPT, OpenAI finally makes its long-anticipated entrance into the search market. Currently available is a prototype version and there’s a wait list to try it out. The plan is to provide not just a list of links in response to search queries, but organized answers with sources.

Auto dealer marketing platform Impel has acquired Outsell, an auto industry-focused CDP-plus-messaging system. Impel’s “conversational AI-based customer lifecycle management solution” serves auto dealers, OEMs and third-party marketplaces. The deal price includes more than $100 million in cash plus equity.

Over 60% of Connected TV advertisers expect to increase spending on the channel according to a study conducted by TV ad solution Premion with research firm Advertising Perceptions. The outlook sees spending rise by 21% on average. Thirty-six percent believe CTV advertising is more effective than traditional TV while just 17% says it’s worth less.

Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.

Data activation and customer engagement platform MessageGears has announced enhancements that will enable it to extract insights into customer behavior and campaign performance direct from enterprise data warehouses. This will give marketing organizations no-code access to the insights without the need for analytics assistance. MessageGears is also introducing predictive segmentation and analytics on contributions to growth by channel.

Advertisers are struggling to make sense of retail media network performance and metrics according to a small sample (63) surveyed by the ANA. The most pressing challenges are standardization of metrics across networks (55%), attribution (48%) and the timeliness of data and analytics (40%). For another view of the topic, check out this report from IAB.