CDP Institute

Are autonomous vehicles coming closer or dropping back in the rear view mirror?  It was two steps back today, with a giant Tesla recall due to its autopilot system not forcing users to pay attention and a 24% layoff at GM’s troubled Cruise subsidiary.  On the sunny side, you can now book an autonomous Waymo ride at the Phoenix airport.

Whether or not your new car drives itself, you can bet it will be collecting data about you. Sonatus has launched a Vehicle Personalization Solution which will enable auto users to personalize their experience and no doubt share their information with a large and ill-defined audience of other devices and businesses.

Have you been waiting up nights for Domo’s eleventh Data Never Sleeps report?  (See what I did there?)  Well, it’s here and the bottom line is there’s more data being generated than ever.  You’re welcome.

The days of AI developers merrily scaping web contents without concern for copyright are clearly numbered.  OpenAI just cut a deal with publishing giant Axel Springer to use its content in return for attribution, links, and some unspecified payments.  They made a similar arrangement with Associated Press earlier this year.

The advertiser trade association ANA has long been cranky about waste in the advertising supply chain.  Its latest 125-page opus lists dozens of problems and estimates that $22 billion of the $88 billion spent on programmatic ads could be saved through greater efficiency. They have lots of suggestions for how to do better, most of which seem require more work for media buyers.

Truth be told, most advertisers are aware of waste in ad buying but accept it as part of doing business.  Their bigger problem at the moment is the impending loss of third-party cookies. This eMarketer study finds that about 80% of programmatic ad buys still rely on cookied inventory (the figures vary by industry).  Lots more on AI, TV measurement, streaming media, and walled gardens.

Are you a retail media fan? Here’s an upbeat DoubleVerify report that finds 61% of retail media buyers feel retail networks perform better than other channels. They’re not entirely thrilled, though: they cite high cost per thousand rates, limited targeting options, limited on-site ad space, and the lack of ad quality verification by third parties such as, well, DoubleVerify.

Are you a retail media skeptic?  Then you’ll prefer this report from Turbyne, which aims to simplify retail media buying, which finds that 78% of brands said a complex buying process makes it difficult or very difficult to justify increasing their retail media investment.  There’s a perception gap for sure: just 6% of larger brands would give their retail media experience an A, while 65% of retailers said that thought their clients would give them an A.

Retail media overlaps to some extent with Digital Out of Home (DOOH) advertising, depending on who owns the ad screen. Hivestack offers a full-stack programmatic DOOH platform, working with brands, agencies, media owners and others. They were just purchased by Perion Network, which provides ad tech across all digital channels, in a deal valued at over $100 million.

Anyone who’s tried to pry an iPhone from the fingers of its owner knows that Apple and Android serve very separate markets.  That wasn’t clear to the judge in Epic Games’ app store monopoly suit against Apple two years ago, but a jury saw things differently yesterday in Epic’s parallel suit against Google’s Play Store.  Google will appeal the decision, of course, but it seems that alternative payment options are only a matter of time.

This survey from Merge, which sells product integration tools, highlights the challenges of working outside an app store to build integrations on your own. It found 68% of companies have built fewer than 10 integrations with customer-facing systems, even though they’d like many more. CRM and marketing automation integrations are the most common, and home-built integrations often face problems with performance, scalability and long-term maintenance.

We’ll just tuck in this unpleasant economic news, because, really, who needs it? Communications agency 10Fold reports that 79% of the B2B tech companies they surveyed report moderate to severe revenue impact due to economic conditions in 2023. One the bright side, 75% plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2024.