CDP Institute

You can never tell what’s behind that light at the of tunnel, but let’s think positive.  Firmex, which helps companies to share confidential data during investment negotiations, reports that merger and acquisition advisors are more optimistic about deal volume and valuations than any time since the start of 2022.  Deals are also taking longer to close and include more contingent compensation, but we’ll take any good news we can get.

As if on cue, we have news that programmatic media services provider MiQ is buying Grasp, which offers media governance and data quality technology.  As you surely know, the programmatic buying chain is convoluted, opaque, and other bad things, so Grasp’s ability to reduce errors can only help. MiQ purchased “privacy-first” audience platform (is there any other kind these days?) Air Grid one year ago almost to the day.

Coincidence or not, here’s another acquisition story.  Getir, the “ultrafast” grocery delivery company that promises to deliver orders within 15 minutes, is buying Fresh Direct, which serves the New York regional market.  Don’t get too excited; Fresh Direct services will continue as before.  I think we can chalk this up to consolidation as the crazily-competitive and complex last mile delivery market adapts to post-Covid reality.

CDP Piwik PRO is merging with consent management platform Cookie Information.  Piwik PRO already had its own consent management capabilities but Cookie Information provides more sophisticated options.  It’s still rare for CDP vendors to have their own consent manager but it’s growing more common.

If you ran X/Twitter and independent research showed a growing disinformation problem, you’d probably try to improve your content screening.  But Elon Musk owns X/Twitter, so his solution is to block independent research.  This Reuters report shows he’s succeeding: a poll of 167 researchers shows more than 100 studies have been canceled.

The Trade Desk found that consumers are less attentive when using social media than other channels and less likely to perceive social media as a platform for premium brand advertising.  They also point out that consumers spend just 41% of their online time within walled gardens (social media but also Google, Amazon, and Apple) but advertisers spend 52% of their money there.  The implication is that spending will shift away from the walled gardens but that ignores their greater targetability.

Every developer knows the danger of building tools to extend a popular platform is the platform owner may add your tools as their features.  People supplementing OpenAI’s ChatGPT were reminded the hard way today when the company announced enhancements to let companies built tailored versions of ChatGPT, now a common third-party add-on, and promised a GPT Store to help developers sell the tailored versions.  OpenAI also snuck in a promise to defend Enterprise customers and developers against copyright claims, matching protections from other major gen-AI developers.

Nearly all business leaders (96%) say data and analytics improves decision-making but fewer than half of marketers (45%) are completely confident in their data accuracy, Salesforce reports.  Technical leaders are more optimistic: 57% of data and analytics and 53% of IT leaders report complete confidence.  Alignment is certainly an issue: employee productivity (47%) is the top metric tracked by technical leaders, while ROI of data initiatives (32%) and speed to insight (28%) are near the bottom.

Digital Experience Platforms, which manage experiences across all customer channels, may eventually replace Content Management Systems but right now account for just 26% of the CMS market, according to this Winterberry Group study for Brightspot.  In line with that: content creation is the most common use (74%) while omnichannel experience ranks fifth at 44%.   CDPs are the third-most-common integration (29%) after Digital Asset Management (36%) and Product Information Management 30%); CRM is last 8%.

Shopify is best of frenemies with Amazon, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing.  Leaning towards the competing side, they’ve launched their own Amazon-style online marketplace, listing all products hosted on Shopify.  There’s a bit of an identity crisis here, since Shop.app asks you to download their app but Shop.app/search lets you search directly from your web browser.

Brand safety is a growing concern as world news gets more miserable.  Google has given advertisers more tools to control where their ads appear by making it easier to select themes to exclude and showing the impact on YouTube and Google Ads audience size of those choices.  Other ad platforms are also bulking up brand safety options, although some work harder than others.

Here a study, there a study, everywhere an AI study.  IDC and Microsoft offer happy ROI news: for every dollar invested, companies report a $3.50 return. Parse.ly finds 67% of companies spend less than $10,000 a year on AI and provides lots of information by industry, company type, and size.  Kaltura reports just 5% of marketers are very worried that AI will make their jobs redundant although 60% of somewhat worried, and has plenty more on AI usage rates, applications, benefits, and concerns.