CDP Institute

Perplexity AI will begin serving ads alongside clearly marked “sponsored” follow-up questions. Whole Foods Market and PMG are among the initial advertising partners. Not only will brands not influence responses to initial questions, the sponsored follow-up questions will also be answered using Perplexity’s regular AI technology.

Speaking of new ad channels, it was only a matter of time until Meta began serving ads on its Threads platform. It will happen early next year, according to reports in The Information. Threads recently hit 275 million monthly users.

Audience platform Alliant has been acquired by private equity firm Inverness Graham. Alliant offers marketers custom audience segments based on data sources including proprietary transactional data. It will continue to operate as an independent company.

Leading French news organizations including Le Monde and Le Figaro have brought a lawsuit against X for infringing “neighboring rights,” a European extension to the traditional concept of copyright. A Paris tribunal issued an order in May instructing X to provide commercial data so that the news organizations could assess the income X earned from their content. X has not yet complied.

Revenue intelligence and demand gen company DemandScience has merged with ABM platform Terminus to create a new company that will operate under the DemandScience name. The move will combine global revenue marketing capabilities with “account-based experience” marketing. ABX by DemandScience will launch as a platform to bring together ABM and syndication activation with cross-channel reporting.

AI-powered marketing platform Jasper has unveiled an AI knowledge layer designed specifically for marketing and based on Jasper’s BrandIQ and MarketingIQ solutions. BrandIQ is a no-code and API based solution to bring brand guidelines into an AI model for text and image creation. MarketingIQ brings knowledge, information and best practices to the LLM.

The cost of subscribing for no ads on Facebook and Instagram has been cut by 40% in the E.U. Users that prefer the free service will also be able to request less personalized ads. Defying pressure from regulators, Meta continues to insist that offering a choice between paid subscriptions and free ad-powered access is a legitimate business model.

Google might have hoped its pivot on third-party cookies would get the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority off its back: no such luck. The CMA sees competition issues in Google’s decision to allow users to choose themselves whether to allow cookies. It wants updated Privacy Sandbox commitments from Google by next month.

AI may be intelligent but it’s not always smart. Researchers at Cornell have shown that AI agents that understand visual interfaces (like a computer screen) can easily be fooled by adversarial pop-ups into clicking buttons or filling forms. Pop-ups that would look very suspicious to humans just don’t trigger the same response from naive AI.

The Southern DIstrict of New York has dismissed a data scraping copyright case brought against OpenAI by Raw Story Media and AlterNet Media. The dismissal was based on plaintiffs’ lack of standing as they could not specify concrete harm to them resulting from OpenAI’s actions. OpenAI and Microsoft still face a copyright suit brought The New York Times on slightly different grounds.

AWS will allow organizations and their partners to generate data and insights in AWS clean rooms using their own custom machine learning models. Advertisers and publishers will be able to optimize campaigns while keeping their data and machine learning models private. AWS Clean Room’s own machine learning offers lookalike modeling that it says improves 36% on industry baselines.

Marketing platform Zenapse has brought its low/no-code prediction service to Google Cloud Marketplace. The move will allow implementation in as little as four hours. ZenImpact Optimization Studio uses AI-powered psychographic signals, plus demographic and behavioral data, to make real-time predictions of which products and offers will resonate with audiences.