CDP Institute

Reddit, the social media platform and community network, has filed a registration statement with the SEC in preparation for an initial public offering of its Class A common stock. Reddit has been a private company since its founding in 2005 and is one of the top 20 most visited websites in the world. The IPO is likely to boost its standing in the advertising market and the expected injection of capital could help refine its ad products, according to experts.

Highly restrictive legislation on minors’ use of social media has passed both houses of the Florida legislature and will now go to Governor Ron DeSantis. The ban covers any sites that, among other things, track user activity and allow children to upload content and interact with each other, regardless of parental approval. Similar laws have been blocked in the courts on First Amendment grounds, most recently in Ohio.

Around 52% of data planners, strategists and activators involved in programmatic advertising think there will be an industry solution to replace third-party cookies, although there’s little evidence that will happen. The group also tends to underestimate the share of traffic on browsers that already block cookies (it’s 44%).  Over a third (the largest group) say they have considered alternatives but found them lacking in scale and accuracy.

Ad Fontes Media, a company that rates news sites for reliability and bias, has announced the integration of its rating data with The Trade Desk’s programmatic advertising platform. This will allow the screening out of highly partisan, AI-generated and clickbait sites, preferentially serving ads to sites containing quality journalism. Directing ad spend to low quality sites not only wastes dollars and threatens brand safety but de-monetizes quality news operations.

Although on-site advertising will remain the central retail media strategy, off-site advertising will play a larger role in 2024. About a third of advertisers plan to shift funds into off-site advertising — including display, online video, CTV and social — in the next twelve months. Retail media will be the fastest-growing ad channel in the US in 2024 according to an October 2023 eMarketer forecast.

The last non-direct click method used by Google Analytics makes it hard to prove the impact of paid social. Similarly, pixel-based click metrics at top of funnel no longer provide an adequate view of impact. Fospha, a measurement platform for ecommerce, advocates combining multi-touch attribution with marketing mix modeling to understand effectiveness of ad spend.

Gartner has finally released a Magic Quadrant for CDPs.  Always skeptical about CDPs, Gartner positions them as a marketing tool and then questions whether CDPs can survive as customer data is used by other departments.

AI means that predictive customer insights can be surfaced faster and are more nuanced than in the past according to Twilio’s fifth annual Customer Data Platform Report. Twilio Segment has added well over 400 predictive traits (so far) to its platform. The report also notes the increased popularity of data warehouses as a destination category.

Adobe has released a new AI Assistant in beta for Reader and Acrobat. It will support the use of conversational AI in pdfs with the ability to generate summaries, unlock insights and answer questions about the three trillion documents worldwide stored in the is format. There will be an add-on subscription plan once AI Assistant is out of beta.

Salesforce is offering a free version of its CDP-esq Data Cloud to Sales and Service Cloud customers, with the apparent goal of increasing use of Marketing Cloud.  The Data Cloud offers Marketing Cloud users a unified view of data in Salesforce clouds and other systems via no-copy access to cloud databases and Mulesoft connectors.  The company also unveiled a small business edition of Marketing Cloud.

Walmart has agreed to acquire VIZIO and its SmartCast Operating System for approximately $2.3 billion. The acquisition should accelerate Walmart’s media business, Walmart Connect, allowing it access to VIZIO’s CTV advertising solutions. VIZIO’s device eco-system featuring the SmartCast OS boasts 18 million accounts, a growth of around 400% since 2018.

The European Union has announced a formal investigation into TikTok over allegations that it has breached obligations to protect minors. Specific problems cited by an E.U. official include “addictive design and screen time limits, rabbit hole effect, age verification, default privacy settings.” TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, could be fined up to 6% of its global turnover if found in breach of the Digital Services Act.