CDP Institute

If you still think that MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig, well, the 1970’s want their disco ball back. Today’s hep cats know that MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a new-but-widely supported standard that lets large language models access structured data as context for their prompts. Early adopters include Salesforce and Adobe, and search platform Algolia is now using it to feed their data to customer-facing real-time AI agents.

Today’s frontier in AI-land is agents reading external data (MCP) and cooperating with other agents (A2A). So it’s almost charmingly retro to see digital experience vendor Optimizely proudly announce that its upgraded Opal AI tool lets users create embedded agents with access to data across the Optimizely One platform. Users also get a new interface, prebuilt tool library to tackle tasks like creating presentations and analyzing web pages, and agents that specialize in specific marketing tasks.

Game developers once feared that players would resent seeing ads, but, well, money. Leading game engine Unity, which released its first ad platform in 2021, just replaced it with a new version that will ingest gamer data from across the Unity eco-system. The new system uses an adaptive model to teach itself how to make ads more effective for certain audiences.

Israel-based Sett has raised $15 million in Series A funding to further develop its game-related agentic AI platform. The platform machine-learns from live campaign data and competitor behavior to generate high-performing marketing content for retention and acquisition. Near as we can tell, it doesn’t produce the games themselves…yet.

Damn the anti-trust rulings, full speed ahead seems to be the motto at Google these days. Their latest extensions include new CTV partnerships allowing ad placement across more streaming services, a new partnership with Roblox to reach gamers, and more ad placements within high-profile live and sports events. Google says its display and video ads are now reaching 98% of CTV households, not least thanks to the enormous reach of YouTube.

When did you last Skype someone? Come to that, when did you first Skype someone? The app, precursor of FaceTime, Zoom and all the rest is bidding farewell after 23 years, with Microsoft rolling it into Microsoft Teams. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The martech universe grew 9% to 15,384 companies, according to the latest Scott Brinker/Frans Riemersma State of Martech report. The study includes a 96-person survey showing the share of B2C and mixed B2C/B2B companies with a CDP at the center of their stack fell by nearly 10% since 2024. But closer analysis suggests what’s really happening is companies are switching to CDPs inside customer-facing systems.

In a new district court filing, the DOJ has proposed that Google divest itself of ad exchange product AdX and pursue a phased sale of ad server DoubleClick for Publishers in order to restore competition in the adtech space. This follows a decision by the judge finding Google guilty of acquiring and maintaining monopoly power in digital advertising. Google argues the measures would harm advertisers and publishers.

StackAdapt will integrate email marketing and a first-party Data Hub into its programmatic advertising platform. This will enable users to activate email campaigns alongside programmatic campaigns in display, TV, video and other media. The email solution is supported by Data Hub which uses first-party data to orchestrate customer journeys and measure outcomes.

You might think that every CDP can integrate external data these days, but that’s not necessarily true. So let’s report that BlueConic has added Secure Data Sharing for Snowflake, which means it can connect directly to governed data within Snowflake without exporting or copying. This was one of a number of recent announcements from BlueConic, including the adoption of a new descriptor for their offering, Customer Growth Engine.

No fewer than 92% of analytics and IT leaders say the need for trustworthy data is greater than ever, with 87% pointing to AI as driving its importance. While 57% of those data analytics and IT leaders have full confidence in their data’s accuracy, just 45% of marketing leaders feel the same. Across 10,000 respondents to the Salesforce survey, there was general agreement that security threats were a challenge to good data management (that doesn’t mean hide it all away in silos — see below).

Jamie from our Department of the Obvious ran into the office the other day waving this report from Adobe, which surveyed 3,200 CX professionals to discover that personalization is hard if customer data is siloed. Specifically, two-thirds believe data siloes block personalized engagement at critical points in the customer journey. Sixty-four percent of senior executives cite security and governance issues as reasons for the silos; 48% admit their data is a mess.