CDP Institute

Marketing automation platform Klaviyo has added a Customer Data Platform.  The company stresses the benefits of integrating CDP data with its analysis and delivery tools – an approach that accounts for 75% of the market, according to CDP Institute data.  It avoids the integration cost and complexity of assembling a collection of separate tools.  

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act is having the intended effect of increasing competition.  Setapp, which runs a subscription platform for Mac users, has announced plans for an alternative mobile app store for iOS.  Available only to EU users, it will enable Apple customers to buy apps without using Apple’s own app store and payment system.  

The prospect of generative AI-powered search from Google both excites and terrifies many in the industry.  In fact, Google already has an experimental version running as an option within Chrome.  They’ve just added several enhancements including definitions within AI-generated responses, AI-generated summaries of long articles, and improved help with AI-generated code.  They’ve also made it easier for publishers to exclude paywalled items from summarization.

Conversation platform Sendbird has partnered with LiveRamp to help Sendbird clients make better use of their first-party data.  The deal apply LiveRamp’s identity framework to Sendbird clients’ internal data sources, so information from different systems can be combined to create a more complete customer view.  No external data is involved.

Clari unifies data from CRM, marketing automation, and other systems so revenue leaders can analyze and act on it.  They might be a CDP, although they’ve never called themselves one.  What they have done is purchase Groove, a sales engagement platform that will help reps do a better job.  Price was not announced.

Lumen tracks users’ eyes as they watch ads to understand what drives their interest.  lt would be seriously creepy if they did it in the wild, but the data is collected from panels of people who have opted in and downloaded a browser extension or mobile app.  Lumen has just partnered with Nexxen (formerly Amobee, Tremor Video, Unruly, and Spearad) to enable attention-optimized campaign planning and creative development across CTV, online video, and display ads.

We’ll cover a broad range of topics today.  First is this Demand Spring report on B2B revenue marketing, which includes two particularly intriguing factoids: just 17% of users report more than six tools in their tech stack (seems low), and Hubspot has overtaken Marketo as the most popular marketing automation system (36% vs 25%) (very plausible).

Let’s switch to retail media networks.  This Integral Ad Science report does a slick job of leading the reader toward their desired conclusion, which is that contextual ads are the best use for retail media dollars.  That’s not how I’d naturally read the report, which finds that buyers pay the most attention to ads for products that are on sale (51%).  It also makes no mention of leveraging first party data, except to note that advertisers list it as the most important retail media opportunity.

What about direct mail?  For some reason, I have two separate studies on the topic. Lob reports that 68% of consumers are more likely to engage with personalized messages, while Quad says that 60% of consumers would quit a brand if their experience wasn’t personalized.  Message received.

The companies building generative AI tools are treading a narrow bridge between describing the risks of their technology and avoiding government regulations that would hurt their business.  The path got a little harder this week when news quality rating organization NewsGuard reported that Open AI’s ChatGPT-4 and Google Bard are generating as many false narratives today as they were when NewsGuard checked in March and April.

In a clear win for the AI industry, the California Public Utilities Commission granted Waymo and Cruise permission to charge for self-driving taxis in San Francisco with virtually no restrictions.  Previous conditions had largely required paid rides to have a safety driver present, although empty and unpaid driverless vehicles have become common in the city.  Local residents are not universally pleased.

The wild success of retail media networks has spawned a need for tools to manage them effectively.  IPG Mediabrands’ media agency network UM has introduced jauntily-named Shoptimizer, a budgeting and optimization tool for the purpose.  The key feature is a dashboard comparing performance of different retail networks and offering AI-powered budget allocation recommendations.