CDP Institute

Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit charging it tricked customers into signing up for Amazon Prime and then made it difficult for them to quit. A jury trial in the suit had already begun. We can only assume that Amazon didn’t like its chances.

Like its Big Tech brethren, Microsoft is often attacked for training AI on published materials without paying the copyright owners. They’re considering a marketplace that would deflect the issue by compensating publishers when their materials are used. But don’t get too excited: so far the “Publisher Content Marketplace” is only a planned pilot program with no firm start date.

OpenAI has built its business on content it hasn’t paid for. But they’re apparently very interested in being paid for the content they generate, in the form of advertising. They are reported to be working on their own in-house ad infrastructure, presumably to avoid reliance on competitors like Google.

Brand safety and media measurement platform Integral Ad Science is being bought by private equity investor Novacap for $1.9 billion. It’s not the first PE rodeo for IAS, which was purchased by Vista Equity Partners in 2018 and went public in 2021. The company reported $530 million revenue in 2024 and is up 16% year-on-year in its latest quarterly report.

Click-based attribution never made much sense for anyone but it is especially irrelevant for B2B marketers with long, complex sales cycles. LinkedIn has launched a more meaningful alternative, Company Intelligence API, which reports aggregated company-level data on engagement across LinkedIn touchpoints. It is sold through analytics partners who can correlate engagement with ad impressions and sales results.

Here’s more progress on the ad measurement front: Acxiom is teaming with The Trade Desk to connect digital and CTV advertising audiences with online and offline sales. The connection is made using UID2 for The Trade Desk ad impressions and Acxiom’s Real ID for client conversion data. Matches are made at the individual level but remain anonymous through the miracle of Acxiom clean rooms.

Traffic to ecommerce websites fell 1% year-on-year while ecommerce app sessions rose 13%, according to Similarweb. Shopper experience still needs improvement: 41% of shoppers feel like strangers to their favorite retailers and only 20% see frequent personalization. Convenience is king: 55% say they’d pay more to find the right item without scrolling through several pages of results.

Consumers continue to resist advertising: Clutch reports that 93% say they skip ads when they can (55%) or always (37%). Oddly enough, this surveys show somewhat higher satisfaction with what consumers do see: 76% say they see relevant ads monthly and 47% are comfortable with personalized content. Entertaining or interactive ads are most likely to capture attention (78%), followed by ads that are informative or inspirational (63%).

Consumers aren’t getting what they want from customer service, either. Although CallMiner found that brands say just 20% of consumers view digital interactions as their preference for most issues, 84% of brands require them to engage with a self-service platform during a typical support journey. Nearly 30% of brands limit escalation options, which isn’t friendly at all.

Media mix models (MMM), originally developed in the 1960’s, have undergone a resurgence as new technologies make them easier to execute and click-based attribution becomes less credible. But evaluating MMM brings its own challenges. Australia-based Mutinex offers a vendor-neutral Open Source MMM Validation Framework which is now available for free to North American marketers and agencies.

Dr. Doolittle could talk to the animals, but how about the animal crackers? Now consumers can, so long as the cracker box has a QR code connected to Digital Link’s AI-powered product assistant. “This is not a gimmick,” says Digital Link CEO Paula Rivero.

Most marketers are (probably) less interested in talking to cracker boxes than the consumers who buy them. But real consumers can be tough to reach. Market Logic Software is solving the problem by converting consumer profiles into chatbots that will answer marketers’ questions through real-time, natural language interactions.