CDP Institute

Attention-based ad measurement is generating a lot of interest these days, largely because traditional viewing measures are increasingly unreliable. Playground xyx uses eye-tracking panel data to measure attention to digital ads. They’ve just teamed with PubMatic to sell audiences optimized for attention.

Sometimes, having people pay too much attention to your ads can be a bad thing. This MAGNA study found that showing the same ad six times in one hour on a streaming network might increase awareness, but it also reduces purchase intent and positive brand perceptions. Consumers assume the advertisers are repeating the ads on purpose.

Identifying anonymous website visitors is also more important in a cookieless word. CDP vendor Cordial has launched a solution that identifies web visitors by matching their devices to a known profile in the Cordial ID graph. Cordial says data in its graph is collected with explicit user consent.

Full Circle Insights helps B2B marketers and sales teams measure their results.  They were just bought by Scaleworks, which buys and runs low-to-mid market B2B SaaS products.  It’s one of relatively few recent private investor acquisitions in martech, suggesting that even bargain hunters are feeling cautious these days.

Roku has been on a tear recently, signing deals to expand its advertising reach in every direction.  Last week it announced an agreement to let Roku ad viewers purchase from Shopify merchants through their TV.   It also announced a separate deal with Comcast-owned FreeWheel to expand access to ad inventory, enable targeted based on Roku data, and reduce ad fraud.

Publishers are increasingly unwilling to let everyone use their content for free.  While most recent discussion has been on payment for news links by Google and Meta, there’s also growing interest in ensuring that AI systems compensate owners whose content is used as training inputs.  OpenAI has gotten a bit ahead of the game in a deal with Associated Press, gaining a license to use its stories in return for undisclosed fees and technology access.  

Worries about training data haunt generative AI like a vengeful ghost.  Google has satisfied European regulators about its Bard data, to the extent that it has now released Bard in the EU.  But ChatGPT owner OpenAI faces multiple data-related lawsuits  and a Federal Trade Commission investigation.

Problems are also opportunities. Anthropic, which has raised a cool $1.5 billion, just launched its latest large language model, Claude2, promising it will explain its results and avoid harmful outputs.  Meanwhile, website search platform Lucidworks announced it will validate results from major generative AI platforms before delivering them to users.  Expect more vendors to let companies use their own data to train large language models.

Escaping LLMs for a moment, HCLSoftware has released a new Marketing Cloud.  The core of the system is HCL Unica, a marketing platform whose origins date back centuries (okay, just one century).  You won’t be surprised that the current version offers all sorts of AI-based automations.

It’s debatable whether any enhancement to a generative AI product is worth singling out as news, given how many happen each day.  But that Adobe Firefly now supports prompts in over 100 languages, and will be localized in 20 languages, seems worth a nod.  Let’s also note that Adobe is paying more attention than most to clarifying the source of content that Firefly creates – a shamefully rare example of responsible Big Tech behavior.

Oh, Canada.😞 This Angus Reid Institute survey finds that 48% of Canadians think the government should “back down” on making Big Tech companies pay for news links while just 26% think it should “stand firm” – even though 61% agree that Big Tech should pay up.  On the other hand, it seems that Microsoft is planning to comply and there is some talk about Canadians shifting searches to Bing.

The on-going Twitter train wreck, now with extra drama from Threads, is another story we can’t cover in any depth.  Some developments you may have missed: Website Planet found Threads posts get more engagement than posts on Twitter; an Ipsos poll found 58% of Americans who use Twitter have tried Threads or are likely to; and, in a characteristically childish and incompetent move, Twitter has made an ineffectual attempt at blocking links to Threads.