CDP Institute

Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content.   But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines.  Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results.  We’ll see if competitors do the same.

Streaming video companies have belatedly recognized that advertising can be more profitable than subscriptions, and are pushing paid subscribers to switch.  Amazon just introduced its own typically arrogant twist on the concept, unilaterally placing all Prime Video customers in an ad-supported plan unless they choose to pay $2.99 per month more than their current $14.99 monthly Prime member fee.

Some surveys suggest that most companies have unified their customer data but many more show the industry has a long way to go.  This Forrester study for NIQ falls into the latter group, with just 24% of respondents reporting they can track customer behavior across ecommerce and in-store retail channels.  Nearly two-thirds (63%) has eleven or more data sources for omni-channel measurement.

There’s probably no limit to Amazon’s greed – because capitalism – but there are constraints as governments regulate BigTech more aggressively and, just maybe, the free market works its wonders. Amazon cited “seller sentiment related to the fee” in its statement pulling back from its planned 2% fee on sellers who don’t use its Prime fulfillment services.  But looming antitrust cases likely had something to do with it.

Oracle held its CloudWorld conference last week.  There weren’t any CDP-specific announcements but they did announce their next-generation Fusion Data Intelligence Platform, which includes comprehensive data models, prescriptive AI models, interactive analytics, and applications leveraging all the above.  They also added guided campaigns for marketing and sales and pretrained large language models for marketing, sales, and service applications.

Fear of losing your job to AI is never far from the surface.  This study from job site Indeed puts marketing in the top 20% (9th of 47) of jobs that generative AI can most easily perform. It may seem odd that jobs like driving, heathcare, and manufacturing are deemed least at risk, but remember this is specifically about generative AI, not all kinds of automation.

Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents.  You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better.  It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange.  Price was not announced.

Microsoft Advertising has expanded its search ad buying platform to include video and connected TV campaigns.  The integration will let advertisers take advantage of search data to target the video and CTV audiences.  They also announced that Microsoft Monetize, the ad sales platform that was formerly AT&T Xandr, will make the ID5 universal ID available to its publishing clients, expanding the addressability of their cookieless inventory.

Forget right message to the right person at the right time.  The real Holy Grail of marketing is tracking behavior after those messages are delivered.  Just-launched Channel99 uses a combination of website tags and ad pixels to measure exactly that, at least for B2B accounts.  Woot.

We’re not quite ready to party like it’s 2019 but there was a touch of déjà vu yesterday when Klaviyo’s share price soared 23% after its initial public offering, which had already been repriced above its target.  The offering gave Klaviyo a valuation of $9.2 billion or roughly 20x its 2022 revenue.

Marigold is a mash-up of martech stalwarts including Campaign Monitor, Cheetah Digital, Emma, Liveclicker, Sailthru, Selligent and Vuture.  They just launched a Relationship Marketing Solution that combines the components into an endless buffet of hyper-personalized marketing goodness.  If you’re wondering how closely the products are integrated, well, that’s a very good question.

Google announced general availability of its automatically created assets for search ads, which creates tailored headlines and descriptions based on the ad context.  They’ve started a beta test of a conversational interface that uses AI to build search campaigns based on little more than the advertiser’s website URL.  Users are still allowed to modify and approve the AI-generated “suggestions”.