CDP Institute

Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents.  You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better.  It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange.  Price was not announced.

Microsoft Advertising has expanded its search ad buying platform to include video and connected TV campaigns.  The integration will let advertisers take advantage of search data to target the video and CTV audiences.  They also announced that Microsoft Monetize, the ad sales platform that was formerly AT&T Xandr, will make the ID5 universal ID available to its publishing clients, expanding the addressability of their cookieless inventory.

Forget right message to the right person at the right time.  The real Holy Grail of marketing is tracking behavior after those messages are delivered.  Just-launched Channel99 uses a combination of website tags and ad pixels to measure exactly that, at least for B2B accounts.  Woot.

We’re not quite ready to party like it’s 2019 but there was a touch of déjà vu yesterday when Klaviyo’s share price soared 23% after its initial public offering, which had already been repriced above its target.  The offering gave Klaviyo a valuation of $9.2 billion or roughly 20x its 2022 revenue.

Marigold is a mash-up of martech stalwarts including Campaign Monitor, Cheetah Digital, Emma, Liveclicker, Sailthru, Selligent and Vuture.  They just launched a Relationship Marketing Solution that combines the components into an endless buffet of hyper-personalized marketing goodness.  If you’re wondering how closely the products are integrated, well, that’s a very good question.

Google announced general availability of its automatically created assets for search ads, which creates tailored headlines and descriptions based on the ad context.  They’ve started a beta test of a conversational interface that uses AI to build search campaigns based on little more than the advertiser’s website URL.  Users are still allowed to modify and approve the AI-generated “suggestions”.

Personalization engine Movable Ink has dipped its toe into CDP waters with Universal Data Activation, an option that assembles data from all sources and makes it available for personalization.  No mention of identity matching or sharing the profiles with other systems, so it’s probably not a proper CDP.  But they are scratching the same itch.

The United Kingdom’s Competition and Marketing Authority (CMA) has been pondering generative AI since back in May.  They just released their findings in the form of a 129 page report that covers the topic from a definition of foundational models through how they work through their impact on consumers.  They finish with seven proposed principles to guide model development and a promise for further discussions.

Most surveys about generative AI report that managers are enamored of the concept and some describe how it’s being used.  I rarely share them because you already know the answers.  But this Harvard Business Review paper actually measured how much gen AI improved the output of professional knowledge workers.  Quite a bit, it turns out.

It’s a slow news day, Dear Reader, so let’s look at changes in the top 100 customer loyalty rankings published by Brand Keys.  The biggest loser is Elon Musk’s X/Twitter, whose shenanigans have earned a drop from 47th to 92nd place.  Tito’s vodka rose from 87th to 34th, making it an even bigger winner than Barbie-fueled Mattel, which went from 88th to 42nd.  Somehow that seems right.

Operative’s State of Digital Advertising 1H 2023 report may not have the snappiest title ever, but it highlights why publishers care so much about identifying their users: advertising cost per thousand for identified users was 2x the CPM for unidentified users on Safari and 3X on Google Chrome.  According to the report, publishers are pulling their low-value anonymous inventory into private channels where they can bundle it with higher value inventory to gain higher revenue over-all.

This study by Smart Insights on digital marketing practices offers the rather sad news that about half of companies are stuck in the lowest maturity stages.  Lack of qualified staff is the biggest obstacle to improvement, followed by low investment in platform integration.  Not-so-fun fact: just 11% of respondents have a well-defined martech stack while 48% have no structured approach to selecting and integrating martech.