CDP Institute

Twilio is making its third layoff in fifteen months, a 5% cut that will remove about 300 people from the payroll. CEO Jeff Lawson blamed higher spending on go-to-market roles for the Segment CDP, which has not produced the expected results. Some cuts will also reduce sales spending on the Flex cloud-based contact center.

Elon Musk is doing a perfectly fine job of destroying X/Twitter without outside help.  But it’s still worth noting that Meta’s intended alternative, Instagram Threads, has reportedly been downloaded more times than X/Twitter since September with a particular jump at the end of November.  Threads is steadily adding new features and will reportedly launch an EU version that will comply with EU privacy regulations.

It’s a sad world where consumers must look to Meta for responsible business practices.  As a reminder of Meta’s own history, they are contesting efforts by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to add new conditions to the privacy consent agreement reached in 2019 – or, as the FTC probably sees it, to comply with the spirit of the original agreement.  Taking a page from a century-old right-wing playbook, Meta is arguing the FTC’s enforcement structure is fundamentally unconstitutional, so it should have no authority regardless of Meta’s behavior.

Efficiency, segmentation, and research top marketing leaders’ list of items to improve, in this Aptitude8 survey, but improving the data hygiene these all rely on ranks last.  Seems to be a bit of a disconnect.  Also interesting: personalization is the least common use of AI (25%). Measurement (47%) and research (43%) head the list and content creation (38%) is somewhere in the middle.

Personalization is probably the main way that consumers interact with AI-based marketing. This Optimove survey finds just 26% feel “very positive” about it, while another 27% think it’s beneficial but have some reservations, 28% have objections, and 19% are neutral. Concerns about data use and being watched head the list of objections to AI; only 15% of respondents had no concerns at all.

Consumers may be lukewarm about AI, but they are passionate about their apps.  Cisco finds that 88% have stopped using an app due to performance issues in the past year and 76% are trying to limit the number of apps on their devices.  Two-thirds (66%) now want to use only the best apps and expect an exceptional digital experience as a standard.  How exceptional can be standard, I don’t know.

It’s Amazon’s world; the rest of us just live in it.  Amazon Web Services (AWS) drove the point home this week by launching an Advertising and Marketing Technology Competency program that certifies vendors as capable of doing their jobs.  Proudly participating CDPs include Acquia, ActionIQ, Adobe, Algonomy, Amperity, Blueshift, CleverTap, Cordial, Tealium, Firsthive, mParticle, Treasure Data, SAS, Segment, Zeta, and likely others that I’ve missed.

Every now and then, global governments humbly suggest that Big Tech companies might adjust their actions ever so slightly to avoid existential harm if it’s not too much trouble.  A group of eighteen countries including the U.S. and Britain took one of those tentative steps this week by offering non-binding recommendations for building AI systems that are “secure by design”.   It’s not clear whether the Tech Overlords took notice.

India-based Rephrase.ai, which uses generative AI to create videos from a text prompt, has been acquired by an unnamed Big Tech firm that is almost surely Adobe. Rephrase says it has over 50,000 users.  The new capabilities will presumably be integrated into Adobe’s existing design tools.

Google will pay to carry stories from Canadian news outlets under an agreement announced yesterday.  Details are sparse but the process for compliance with government’s C-18 law has been simplified to meet some Google objections.  Meta, the only other firm required to make payments under the law, has not changed its decision to block reliable news.

The threat that large language models will reach human levels of performance on common tasks is overblown, according to research co-authored by Meta’s top AI scientist Yann LeCunn.  A new benchmark of real-world problems found that humans succeeded at 92% while ChatGPT-4 with plug-ins solved only 15%.  A cynic would note that Meta has a strong interest in reducing pressure for AI regulation, and that other experts have argued the debate over human-like performance is a distraction from concrete problems that AI poses today.

Shopping on social media has had mixed success but this report from The Influencer Marketing Factory finds it’s making steady progress.  Nearly half (43.4%) of consumers surveyed had bought at least one product through a social app in the past year.  Still, many more would rather buy on an ecommerce platform (62%) than through social (22%), with trust in the social apps standing as the most important obstacle.