CDP Institute

Back in the day, Facebook could be used to follow and engage with your friends. Then, in its wisdom, it filled your feed up with algorithmically generated and often irrelevant posts. Now it’s bringing the “magic” of an “OG” Facebook experience back with an updated Friends tab, free of recommended junk content.

Observers are pleased that genAI systems are developing the ability to explain the logic behind their results. But researchers from Anthropic report models like Anthropic Claude may claim to execute multi-step reasoning while actually making up an answer or working backwards from a clue provided in the prompt.  The systems also show a disturbing ability to evade guardrails intended to prevent such deception.

The latest generative AI move from Amazon lets users create descriptive prompts indicating their interests, and then surfaces relevant products and services.  It’s a step beyond traditional search based on keywords and past behaviors.  The feature, rather boringly named “Interests”, is now available to a small audience of U.S. users in the Amazon app or on the mobile website.

Customer engagement platform Braze, which isn’t quite a CDP but builds unified customer profiles for its own activation components, announced an agreement to acquire AI decisioning company OfferFit for $325 million. OfferFit provides a multi-agent solution that recommends individual-level cross-channel customer journeys. It’s a big bet for Braze: the price is nearly 10% of the company’s $3.86 billion market cap.

Chord Commerce, a CDP for commerce brands, is much smaller than Braze but shares a scope ranging from customer data assembly to AI-powered insights, attribution, and activation.  They’ve just raised $5.5 million to further invest in AI-orchestrated cross-channel marketing.  The round brings total funding to $45.5 million.

Utiq offers addressable audiences based on identifiers collected (with user consent) by four European telcos. It just announced the successful integration of its technology with Adobe Real-Time CDP.  In one test campaign, Utiq’s first-party identifier combined with Authentic Audiences in the Adobe CDP to yield a 290% uplift in impressions in non-Chrome browsers and a 61% better re-identification rate than targeting with cookies.

With only eight days left until President Trump’s executive order reprieve of TikTok expires, Pew Research reports that only 34% of U.S. adults now support a ban, down from 50% two years ago. The number that believe TikTok poses a security threat has dipped ten points over the same period. Support for the ban has also declined in both parties.

Instacart has launched a suite of AI-powered tools to enhance campaign performance. These include Universal Campaigns which allows advertisers to create one campaign with a unified budget that automatically optimizes across various ad formats. Other tools are AI-powered landing pages, recommendations for campaigns and suggestions for product library enhancements.

Fifty-four percent of U.S. consumers don’t pay attention to brand if a product meets their needs according to a survey of some 2,000 U.S. consumers by SAP Emarsys. Indeed, 57% have switched to “own label” alternatives to brand and 55% find the quality comparable. Not surprising then that 88% of marketers say their engagement strategies need a rethink in 2025.

CDP Simon Data has announced the launch of Goals-Based Marketing, initially featuring an AI-powered segmentation workflow. The ultimate goal of this approach is to create revenue-generating customer experiences at scale. The new offering is driven by three AI agentic teams (Strategy Agents, Data Execution Agents, and Revenue Impact Agents) and features Smart Fields and Smart Segments, aimed at uncovering customer behavior patterns.

Meanwhile, Simon Property Group (no relation) is ingesting first-party data from its portfolio of some 200 shopping, dining, and entertainment mixed-use destinations into its media division. This will allow retailers to build target audiences based on Simon insights. The audiences can then be activated, either through the retailer’s own digital channels or through Simon’s nationwide in-mall retail media network.

AI can now be present throughout the entire media campaign lifecycle, from planning to analysis of results and recommendations according to the IAB’s 2025 State of Data Report. Not everyone is taking advantage, with 70% of brands, agencies and publishers not yet integrating AI across all facets of campaigns. Major hurdles are data readiness, security and fragmented tools, but 49% of brands, agencies and publishers are actively seeking to overcome them.