It’s beginning to look like access to customer data is as valuable as access to the customers themselves. Springbot, which provides marketing automation to small ecommerce companies, has set up a co-op to let its clients pool anonymous customer profiles and send campaigns to look-alikes of their own customer lists. Springbot sends the campaigns, so retailers only get information about responders. Springbot collects its clients’ data through integration siwth Big Commerce, Magento, and Shopify.

ScanMyPhotos isn’t alone in taking a position on public issues: OnBrand Magazine found that 79% of marketing decision-makers are including social and cultural issues in their 2018 strategies and 36% are excited to explore brand activism.

Like trouble, bad behavior by Meta shows up whether you look for it or not.  The latest is an open-source language model that was supposed to provide reliable search results because it was trained on academic papers.  Alas, it was quickly withdrawn after reviewers found that it returned results that were grammatical and plausible but also incorrect, not to mention filled with “antisemitism, homophobia, and misogyny.”  How can this be a surprise?