Just weeks after Optus reported the records of 10 million Australian customers had been compromised in a breach, its parent company Singtel confirmed a 2020 breach and has found the data available on a data leak forum that also threatened to release Optus’ stolen data.
You might think that AI is common in marketing, but just 8% of the respondents to this Ascend2 report for Pecan AI are using machine learning for predictive analytics. Most of the answers came from small businesses (72% from companies with fewer than 50 employees), so adoption could be higher at larger companies. Just 9% felt highly confident that their company was prepared for the loss of third-party cookies.
Arizona’s Attorney General sued Google in 2020 for use of “dark patterns” to manipulate user behavior. The state also accused Google of using location tracking services even when companies had tried to turn off that capability. This settlement is to resolve the location tracking claims and, while very high, is still tiny for a company whose 2021 ad revenue was close to $200 billion.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.