CDP Institute

TikTok has finally launched its U.S. e-commerce product, TikTok Shop, which will offer live video shopping, shoppable ads, and affiliate programs for creators.  This follows months of testing amid concerns that social commerce has struggled in the U.S. even though it’s wildly successful in China and elsewhere.

This members-only IAB report documents the growth and frustrations of the retail media market.  Criteo is trying to help with a new buying platform, Commerce Max DSP, that combines access to onsite and instore media buys.  They’ve supplemented it with a trio of tools based on previous acquisitions of Mabaya (marketplace tactics and formats), Brandcrush (offline inventory), and Gradient (insight and data tools).

The U.S. Justice Department’s three year old antitrust suit against Google finally reached trial yesterday.  Of all the suits facing Google, this is the big one, focused squarely on its dominance of the search advertising market and possibly requiring a break-up of its business should Google lose.  You can expect several more years of fun before anything is resolved.

Salesforce kicked off its annual Dreamforce conference yesterday with the usual spectacle.  On the substantive front, they announced new data integrations to exchange data with Snowflake, Databricks, and Amazon Web Services without loading it into their Data Cloud CDP.  The AI engine, the Einstein 1 Platform, also can now access anything available in Data Cloud.

Claritas furthered its ambitions to become “the top closed-loop service provider” to the marketing industry with the purchase of ArtsAI, which offers attribution, ad campaign optimization, and personalization tools for audio advertising.  Claritas expects to apply the ArtsAI tools to other channels as well.

We don’t write much about influencer marketing here because, frankly, a lot of it seems sketchy.  But PQMedia just put the global market at $34 billion in 2023, up 17% from 2022.  That’s the same magnitude as retail media, audio, and out of home, which seems too big to ignore completely.

Let’s journey down the ad measurement rabbit hole today, Dear Reader.  First stop is a new partnership that will apply TransUnion’s multi-touch attribution solution to TikTok campaigns.  Measurement is at the campaign level although the underlying analysis looks at individual behaviors.  It’s part of TikTok’s on-going effort to increase its appeal to advertisers.

Next comes news that advertisers will be able to connect Epsilon’s individual-level CORE ID with LiveRamp’s RampID.  The integration will expand the reach available to advertisers because CORE ID tracks identifiers that RampID does not.  It’s all based on first-party data without third-party cookies or mobile device identifiers.

Finally, we’ll note that Nielsen has backed down on its plan to include Amazon data in its Thursday Night Football audience measurements, at least for purposes of ad billing.  This particular tale has more twists than an arthritic rattlesnake; I’m only mentioning it here since our last report said Nielsen was steaming ahead and we want to keep the record straight.

Tighter budgets are slowing progress towards data unification and leading to poor vendor selection decisions, according to the CDP Institute’s latest member survey. The share of respondents reporting a CDP or other type of unified customer database fell compared with previous surveys, the first time that ever happened. More companies are prioritizing cost over features in their vendor selection projects, even though companies that select based on cost show less satisfaction with their martech results.

A consortium of major European telcos has launched a consent-based digital identity service that will let consumers decide which companies can see their data. The new joint venture, named Utiq, includes Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone and has been pre-cleared by the European Commission. CDP vendor Teavaro will provide technology and service delivery.

Here’s another skirmish in the on-going battle over AI systems’ use of published data. News/Media Alliance, a publishing industry trade group, has issued guidelines it would like AI developers to follow when they use someone else’s intellectual property. As you might imagine, it’s a bit of a wish list for approaches that would favor copyright owners.