CDP Institute

Business processes using generative AI grew by 400% in 2023, according to work automation platform Workato. While operations roles are automating more processes than any other group, the leading adopters specifically of generative AI are RevOps and IT. The citizen developer trend continues to grow with 44% of automated processes developed outside IT (although IT plays coach for many of those).

Less funding, fewer product announcements and reduced M&A activity were the hallmarks of the martech space in 2023, said stack management platform CabinetM in their year end review. The slowdown became gradually visible as the year wore on with the worst performance in all categories in Q4. Unsurprisingly, Q4 investment heavily favored AI (22% of funding) with workflow and productivity in second place.

CEOs are leaning heavily on marketing and communications to drive short-term profits and long-term growth in 2024, with 95% planning to maintain or increase funding for AI capabilities for those teams. Seventy-nine percent anticipate a positive effect of AI on the marketing function. This is based on a survey of over 1200 international CEOs.

Omnichannel supply-side platform OpenX has created a Cookieless Deal Library that will enable advertisers to evaluate the full range of cookieless targeting options to activate in the DSP of their choice. This will allow the testing of multiple cookieless solutions, including against each other, and the development of new success benchmarks. The options include, but are not limited to, alternative identifier deals, contextual deals and Privacy Sandbox Topics deals.

In the early days of cookieless Chrome, publishers earned 45% less revenue per session from users who disabled cookies, according to data analyzed by ad platform Assertive Yield. The loss was actually a bit worse when Google’s Topics API was enabled. By some crazy coincidence, Google’s own AdX and Open Bidding win rates actually improved, meaning Google bought more ads at a lower rate.

Now that it seems Google will really and sincerely deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome this year, advertisers are paying more attention to the search for alternatives.  This Comscore Proximic study finds most of their money will go towards contextual data (28%) and first party data (27%).  Despite the best efforts of adtech vendors and data compilers, alternative IDs rank last at 8%.

Customer communication platform Iterable is launching the Iterable Ingest Toolkit as part of its winter product release. It features Smart Ingest that connects with major cloud platforms and allows marketers to pull customer data into Iterable. Iterable is also bringing AI-driven customer insights to its users’ Snowflake data through its Snowflake Secure Data integration.

Although physical stores and company websites remain the most popular business channels for retailers, social commerce (used by 50%) is now only two points behind mobile web/apps in popularity. As for retail media networks, 51% of retailers added one to their digital service offerings in 2023. Marketplaces are also growing in popularity thanks to their extension of customer reach.

The growth of programmatic ad spend will be double that of nonprogrammatic in 2024 according to a forecast by eMarketer Insider Intelligence. Around 90% of ad dollars will transact programmatically despite concerns about transparency and control. Mobile will continue to be the programmatic channel of choice; it has commanded at least a 70% market share since 2018.

Act-On Software has created a Data Lake that will let users import first- and second-party data and account data enrichment. The Data Lake will integrate with Snowflake and Snowflake Data Marketplace to support data sharing within the Snowflake ecosystem.  The company calls it a “private CDP” which is an odd phrase but the data sharing via Snowflake might just let it meet CDP requirements.

Integrate, the B2B demand management platform, has launched Performance Center, providing AI-powered insights to support accelerated marketing decision-making. The new solution will help identify gaps in buying groups at accounts and create trust and reliability scores for media and content syndication partners. The score is based on tracking millions of data points to assess campaign performance.

The University of Chicago’s Nightshade anti-scraping tool received a quarter of a million downloads in just five days. The tool alters images to fool genAI about their content, leading to “poisoning” the model which will begin to offer irrelevant responses to prompts. It sits alongside Kin.art in the battery of weapons artists can use to defend their intellectual property.