CDP Institute

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer seems to be theory at Shopify, which has just reversed its position and will now allow Shopify merchants to add a Buy with (Amazon) Prime option to their checkout.  The deal is carefully crafted: merchants can use Amazon’s fulfillment capabilities but payments and customer data remain within the Shopify system.  How, or whether, they’ll prevent Amazon from capturing information used to fulfill the purchases is unclear.

There’s nothing shocking in the sixth edition of Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, but it does confirm what we already knew: customers expect personalized treatment, care about deals more than anything else, and feel they work too hard to resolve service issues.  Just 47% of consumers say they generally trust companies, with the most doubts about ethical use of AI and acting with society’s best interest in mind.  Openness to using AI to improve customer experience has fallen, though, from 65% of consumers in 2022 to 51% in... Read More >

The Marketing AI Institute also has a new AI survey, this one focusing on marketers’ attitudes.  Again, no huge surprises: more marketers think AI is important for success than last year (64% vs 51%).  The main use seems to be personal productivity: 29% say they’ve already infused AI into their daily work while just 7% say their company is scaling its AI deployments.  A frightening 78% say their company has no internal AI education or training.

Google Cloud has a blizzard of announcements from its Google Cloud Next ’23 event.  Much focus was on generative AI, including optimized infrastructure, model building tools, and end-user assistants such as writing helpers.  They’re also offering access to third-party large language models including Meta’s Llama2, Antropic’s Claude 2, and Technology Innovative Institute’s Falcon LLM.

Also at Google Cloud Next, AI-based content creation tool Typeface announced it has collaborated with GrowthLoop (originally data extraction tool Flywheel) to create a unified marketing solution that automatically builds audience segments, generates custom content, and distributes the results across multiple channels.  It’s a good example of how AI and cloud platforms enable companies outside of the traditional marketing technology space to quickly develop sophisticated products.

Hospitality marketing vendor (and CDP) Cendyn has purchased WIHP, a specialist in “metasearch”, which is the hospitality industry term for connecting hotels with price comparison websites.  We don’t see too many acquisitions by CDP vendors, but, then again, CDP is just one of many features offered by Cendyn.

We’ve seen a small uptick in financial activity in the past week or two, although it could reflect nothing more than the end of summer.  In any case, here’s news that customer engagement platform Engageware is buying Argentina-based Aivo, which provides AI-driven conversational technology to call centers.  Price was not announced.

Aditude offers a “proprietary cloud-based header bidding tech stack for publishers” which you may or may not find strangely exciting.  We won’t judge.  We will tell you they just raised a $15 million Series A.

Maybe what you really can’t get enough of is news about media measurement.  If so, you probably know that Nielsen has raised industry eyebrows by announcing it will use Amazon’s own data along with its usual measurements when reporting the audience for Amazon’s broadcast of Thursday Night Football.  The latest plot twist – and I hope you’re sitting down – is that frequent Nielsen critic Video Advertising Bureau feels that’s not fair.  You can’t make this stuff up.

Zeta Global has joined the growing list of companies making their data available to Snowflake clients.  The new offering, Customer Growth Intelligence, offers Zeta’s U.S. identity graph and behavioral, transactional, local, and professional data on the Snowflake Marketplace.  Clients can read the data directly from the Snowflake Data Cloud.

Most attempts to reduce the carbon footprint of online advertising seem like smoke and mirrors.  SeenThis is more concrete: they stream video ads directly to end users, reducing the amount of data movement that is otherwise required.  Media buying agency GroupM just set up a global partnership to make SeenThis tech available to GroupM clients.

It’s not your imagination: people are really getting more cranky.  The particular people we’re referring to here are B2B buyers, whom Merkle reports are less satisfied with every step in the purchase process than they were a year ago.  They’re also taking to buy and more likely to replace incumbent vendors with someone else.  Have a great day!