There’s already been plenty of comment on Facebook’s plan to refocus the news feed on personal messages. My take is it’s a clever defensive move to relinquish power over public opinion before national governments grab the company to secure that power for themselves. After all, being nationalized is bad for business and Facebook’s only real purpose is to make money. As it should be.

Most of the news from NRF seemed to be about in-store systems – not especially surprising, but where were artificial intelligence or unified online/offline experience? Instead we have point of sale marketing specialist Ecrebo announcing a new platform to deliver targeted offers at checkout via printed receipts, digital receipts, or customer-facing screens. Ecrebo bases its targeting on a central database that combines transactions and other data from all channels, so it does look a bit like a CDP. Not that I’m obsessed.

GrowthLoop will use TransUnion identity data to improve U.S. consumer match rates on client files sent to advertising media such as Facebook and Google Ads.  The data should also help clients to find matches among records within their files, building more accurate customer profiles.  GrowthLoop calls itself a “composable CDP”, meaning it works with data assembled in external data warehouses.