CDP Institute

Let’s look past the trees to some forests today, Dear Reader.  Here’s news that digital experience analytics vendor Contentsquare is buying product analytics platform Heap.  Closer integration of product marketing and consumer marketing has been a trend for some time.

Another long-term development is the slow collapse of social media advertising as users and ad buyers find more compelling alternatives.  This Skai report brings it into focus: paid social ad cost per thousand were down 29% year- on-year, although impressions and clicks rose 35% so net ad spend was down just 4%.  By contrast, paid search cost per click was largely flat (down 4% year-on-year) while retail media impressions, clicks, and spend were all up (32%, 36%, and 35%, respectively).

This Kantar report confirms what you probably knew already: online video and video streaming are the fastest growing competitors for social media ads.  This, in turn, is seeding growth of new solutions like this Dentsu, GumGum Verity and Iris.tv joint effort to enable keyword-based contextual targeting and brand safety controls to Connected TV ads. (This item also illustrates a trend of companies to reveal news without a formal press release or blog post; that’s a bad direction in a world where the truth of unsourced news items is always in... Read More >

Back in July, concerns about unauthorized data leaks led OpenAI to stop letting ChatGPT browse the internet via Microsoft Bing.  They’ve apparently resolved the issues, at least to their own satisfaction, and are now enabling that feature again.  Whether they’ve resolved them everyone else’s satisfaction is another question.

We wrote earlier this week about Samsung adding more interactive formats to its TV-based advertising. Arch competitor LG is also adding value for advertisers, in their case through better measurement of ad results.  They’re correlating retail purchase data from Affinity Solutions with records of ads served that LG captures through automated content recognition.

Some people mark autumn by pumpkin spice latte, but marketers more attuned to the semi-annual release of The CMO Survey, published by Duke/Fuqua and friends since 2008.  The latest edition has all the traditional greatest hits, including marketing budgets and CMO attitudes.  There’s also plenty about AI (it adds value); digital transformation (definite progress but more to be done) and staffing (hiring has slowed as budgets tighten).

Unauthorized training data isn’t an existential threat to generative AI but it’s certainly a headache for users and developers alike.  Most developers are trying to exclude materials that creators have explicitly labeled as unauthorized and citing “fair use” as justification for copying everything else.  Getty Images has taken an opposite approach, building its gen AI tool only on materials that are explicitly licensed.  It’s possible that tracing the provenance of training data will become a standard, similar to how organic food producers trace the origins of their ingredients.

Fraud accounts for 22% of online ad spend, according to this Juniper Research study, even higher than the 15% the ANA estimated is spent on “made for advertising” websites (bear in mind the two figures are measuring different things).  Also bear in mind that ad buyers don’t really seem to care: Ascend2 found ad fraud ranked dead last in their list of concerns, cited by 16%.  The top two concerns were finding the right audience (41%) and measuring ROI (38%).

Retail theft by shoplifters and organized crime has captured headlines recently, such as news that Target is closing nine stores due to the problem. But the surge may be more of a ripple: the National Retail Federation found losses grew only as fast as retail sales in the past year. Could it be that the press has sensationalized the issue or that managers are using it to distract from other problems?

Acquia has launched an integration hub, Acquia Exchange, that makes it easier to connect third party products to its digital experience platform.  Having an exchange of your own is table stakes for products hoping to establish themselves as platforms at the heart of their very own ecosystem.

Remember when TVs were something you watched?  Those days are long gone; not only are TVs watching back, but they’re interacting with you in a friendly yet Big Brother-ish sort of way.  The reason, of course, is to sell more valuable advertising.  Samsung Ads just upped its interactive ad game by working with Brightline to allow live and personalized ads, polls, trivia, and scrollable carousels.

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday filed its long-awaited anti-trust suit against Amazon, charging the company with oodles of anti-competitive actions to maintain an illegal monopoly. Seventeen state attorneys general joined the fun.  Feel free to read the 172-page filing and compose a summary haiku.