CDP Institute

CDP mParticle is introducing AI Assistance, allowing users to enrich profiles and improve targeting by giving directions in a natural language interface. It is also promoting “composability,” configuring connections to any data store, and simplifying the “value-based” introduced last year.

Hoping to play a regulation-hostile judiciary, the IAB has filed its first-ever lawsuit, attempting to block the FTC’s “click to cancel” rule making it easier for consumers to cancel subscriptions. The IAB complains about a failure to follow correct procedures, vague language, and threats to “a business model essential to companies of all sizes across various industries.”  Raise your hand if your business depends on trapping unhappy customers.

Meta has stopped even pretending to avoid right-wing misinformation on its site.  The Washington Post reports that it has declined to block ads designed to appear they are from the Kamala Harris campaign but paid for by her opponents. Applying the logic of an ill-bred two-year-old, the company argues it’s okay because others have done similar things in the past.

Meta is building a web crawler to provide answers to users’ queries in Meta AI, the company’s cross-platform chatbot, say unconfirmed reports. This would reduce reliance on Google and Bing. It would also enter Meta into the busy AI search engine space alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google and Microsoft.

Much heralded at Dreamforce in September, Salesforce says Agentforce is now here. It represents a new layer in the Salesforce suite supporting the creation and deployment of custom AI-powered agents that can take autonomous action across business functions. It also offers a customer-facing Agentforce Service Agent.

Larger companies that have a martech strategy are more likely (65%) to have a CDP than those without a martech strategy (43%) according to research by Acxiom. This is a larger spread than seen with other tools in the martech stack. Almost all businesses surveyed plan to make changes to their stack in the next twelve months, with more adding tools (29%) than consolidating (15%).

Meta has entered into a multi-year agreement with Reuters to use its news coverage as a basis for responses in the Meta AI chatbot. It is the first news deal Meta has made in the current AI environment. Questions about the news will cite Reuters and link to its content; terms remain confidential.

Alembic has added a Brand Health Daily Sentiment Tool to the Alembic Marketing Intelligence Platform. It will provide daily sentiment scores together with contextual insights and will benchmark brands against competitors. The scores will be based on sentiment data from social media, web traffic and daily survey data.

Attention, which automates the transformation of customer conversations into actionable insights, raised $14 million in Series A funding to power its next phase. Foundational capabilities include automating CRM entries and creating follow-up emails based on customer interactions. Down the road, Attention envisions fully automating the routine tasks of revenue and sales teams.

Autonomous AI agents are very much in style.  Not to be left out, Microsoft will start a public preview next month of capabilities for businesses to create their own autonomous AI agents. The tools have been in private preview since May. Microsoft will also launch 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365.

Marketing mix modeling (MMM) is gaining popularity as companies look to replace cookie-based measurement.  Consumer intelligence company NIQ is joining the party with MMM solutions using its global data on retail purchases and digital media data assets. NIQ will also offer matched market testing to measure sales effects of a media campaign in a live environment before full rollout.

It’s full steam ahead for influencer marketing on TikTok despite the U.S. government’s threat to ban the Chinese-owned social media platform, says a new report by Linqia. Sixty-six percent of a 200 person sample of enterprise marketers are sticking with TikTok. Forty-two percent have a dedicated influencer marketing team, while almost 90% saw their influencer marketing budgets rise this year.