CDP Institute

Unless you’re a designer, the last time you thought about Figma was probably when Adobe dropped its $20 billion bid to acquire them due to anti-trust objections. They’re now back in the news with a rare IPO announcement. They also recently bought open source CMS Payload, marking a major expansion beyond design into execution.

Digital media and advertising platform Ad.com is prioritizing purpose along with performance by acquiring Public Good. Public Good serves purpose-driven brands by using AI-driven contextual targeting to deliver personalized recommendations for engagement and action, at the right moment. Ad.com expects to help Public Good scale globally.

Nearly all marketers are using AI somewhere in their workflows with ChatGPT leading adoption at over 80%, according to a survey of 155 U.S.-based SEO and marketing pros by Search Engine Journal. Content creation and optimization is the central use case with 76.8% reporting time saving benefits. Top worries, unsurprisingly, focus on trust, accuracy and brand risk.

AI writing assistant Grammarly is expanding its offering by acquiring Superhuman, an AI-native email app. Grammarly’s AI agents already support email creation. Superhuman is an agentic AI workspace that accelerates sending and responding to emails as well as triaging inboxes, scheduling meetings and interacting with other systems.

You need to pay a fare to ride a bus and, if Cloudflare has its way, AI models will soon need to pay a fare to crawl all over your content. The program, currently in beta, will allow sites to set the price. It will also, by default, block non-paying AI crawlers from site access.

But just wait a moment, because start-up Bright Data is delivering a set of AI search and discovery tools to give LLMs and AI agents frictionless access to the open web. One of these new tools, Browser.ai, is billed as an “unblockable” AI-native browser that defies detection by mimicking human users. Place your bets now.

Digital advertising analytics platform DoubleVerify is launching DV Authentic Attention for social, adding to its existing capabilities for the web and CTV. As with the other channels, attention metrics for social will include viewable time and screen share, plus eyes-on-screen ad signals from Lumen Research. It’s kicking off on Snapchat, with other platforms expecting to be added later this year.

AI-powered marketing and PR agency Imperium AI is delivering a copilot suite that will support marketing and PR as well as social media and content marketing. Capabilities include creation, optimization and distribution of press releases, automatic creation of blog posts and a fully automated social media presence with differentiation across platforms. In addition to attracting early users, Imperium is offering white label partnerships to other agencies.

In its run-up to passing the Trump Administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”, the Senate voted to remove the proposed ten-year ban on state regulation of AI systems. The vote was 99-1, with even Senator Ted Cruz voting against the measure he had originally championed.

Alliant, which assembles audiences based on transaction data, has acquired AnalyticsIQ in a move funded by Alliant’s owner, private equity firm Inverness Graham. AnalyticsIQ brings predictive analytics to bear on marketing behavior based on cognitive psychology. The goal is to offer advertisers insights not only into what consumers are doing but also why.

Warehouse-native CDP Hightouch is expanding its identity resolution capabilities to include Adaptive Identity Resolution, which offers both deterministic and probabilistic resolution. Users can toggle between high accuracy and high reach according to the needs of different use cases.

While only a third of publishers and media businesses use data clean rooms to build audiences, a much larger segment — 64% — are collaborating with advertisers via clean rooms to share audience data, plan campaigns and measure performance, according to a Digiday survey sponsored by Optable. Digiday identifies this as a core data monetization strategy. While almost three-quarters of marketers believe audience segmentation and targeting are the best routes to data value, over 50% say integrating data from different tools is the biggest barrier to this (according to an... Read More >