The scare headlines for this report from CHEQ scream that fake traffic costs companies $142.8 billion in lost revenue, although a closer reading shows the actual ad budget spent on is closer to $35.7 billion, based on 5.9% of paid traffic being fake. Still, that’s enough to worry about. Download for interesting details by traffic type, region, and industry.
Is privacy a competitive differentiator? Fewer marketers seem to think so: the annual Salesforce State of Marketing Survey found just 51% exceed the legal requirements for privacy compliance, compared with 61% in the previous report. Maybe they’re just busy with other work: the number of average data sources grew from ten to fifteen, and the number of marketing metrics used increased by 13%.
Prescient AI collects data about a company’s sales and other business results and correlates that with advertising programs. It’s not as precise as direct attribution via third-party cookies or pixels, but also doesn’t rely on those being available – which they increasingly are not. Prescient just raised a $4.5 million seed round, on top of $1.7 million pre-seed funding in 2021.
Salesforce kicked off its big Connections conference yesterday, and if you’re surprised the focus was on generative AI, you haven’t been paying attention. Still, the focus this time was on marketing applications that draw on Salesforce CDP data, so it’s right up our alley. They also announced direct access to Google BigQuery data, ticking the “zero-copy” box as well.