Apple doesn’t make its money from customer data, so it can more easily take the privacy high road. They’ve announced changes to their Safari Web browser that will let advertisers capture ad clicks for campaign measurement without tying the clicks to identifiable individuals. It will limit first-party as well as third-party data, so if you’re a marketer, you’re likely to be affected.
Customer Data Platforms are the top investment priority for e-commerce marketers, with 65% planning to increase spend in 2019. This from a study by Oracle and the CommerceNext conference. Bad news is that unified customer data is also the most disappointing of 2018 investments, with 52% saying results fell below expectations. Personalization and omni-channel marketing were almost as disappointing, at 51% and 47%. This stuff is hard.
Finally, Upland Software just bought B2B content curation platform Kapost. Price was $50 million on $15 million revenue. You may recall that Upland bought email automation vendor PostUp at a similar ratio just last month. It’s what they do.
“Ask Meta AI anything” is what you now see instead of the traditional search bar across Meta apps such as Facebook and Instagram. Meta AI will still perform the basic search function but will also answer questions and chat with you. It should hardly be a surprise when a tech company launches a genAI solution these days but this is a bold challenge to Google and Open.ai (it’s also available as a standalone tool at Meta.ai).