CDP Institute

Back in March, Salesforce announced it would integrate generative AI with its CRM system. Last week, it was Slack’s turn, with lots of nice promises to do things like have Slack summarize conversations, embed AI within workflows, and query CDP data with a conversational interface.  Most of it isn’t ready yet, but let’s give Salesforce credit for stating that clearly.

We reported last week that nearly half of advertisers and publishers expect Google to delay cookie deprecation again.  That hasn’t happened yet, but they did just announce they are rolling out First Party Sets, which loosens the rules a bit by enabling related websites to share what would otherwise look like third-party cookies for limited purposes such as shared sign-on.  Hmm.

I vaguely recall a satire where ads were inserted at contextually relevant spots in movies, such as a cellphone ad when ET calls home.  Wait, that’s the example given to explain an utterly serious announcement last week of a new ad placement option from Roku.  “Roku’s artificial intelligence searches the Roku library for iconic plot moments that match a brand’s message and place their ads in real time.”  So horrifying it might just work.

Elon Musk may have pretty much destroyed the value of blue checkmarks at Twitter, but others think they’re worth doing right.  The latest convert is Google Gmail, which is offering a blue checkmark on emails from brands that use its BIMI authentication service.  Other recent checkmarketeers include Google Ads, LinkedIn, and Meta.

Publishers have long complained that search and social media companies share their content without paying for it.  Google and Facebook have aggressively opposed such efforts in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.  TikTok, on the other hand, just announced a program to let publishers share a reported 50% of revenue from ads near their content.

With one eye on the CDP market, cloud database vendors keep extending their ability to meet the special needs of handling customer data.  Cloud lakehouse vendor Databricks just took another step by acquiring Okera, which uses AI to identify sensitive data and apply rules that control how it’s used.

Most proposals to limit the harm that social media does to kids and teens aim at restricting the youngsters’ access to those services.  The U.S. Federal Trade Commission just aimed closer to root causes by proposing to ban Meta from making any money off its young users.  The ban is framed as an adjustment to the company’s 2020 privacy settlement, which the FTC says the company has consistently violated.

Marketers are eagerly – you might say frantically – looking for new sources of data on customer behavior to replace what’s being lost to privacy rules.  Commerce data platform Attain owns one of those goldmines, based on transaction data it collects through its Klover financial app.  They’ve just partnered with The Trade Desk to make the information more easily available for ad targeting.

We don’t like reporting rumors, but this one is awfully juicy: Microsoft is said to be preparing a private version of ChatGPT that will ensure data isn’t shared when it’s used in a prompt.  Charge could be “ten times” the normal ChatGPT fee, which would certainly be a good deal for Microsoft.  It’s not clear whether this would be affected by last week’s announcement that ChatGPT will let users keep their prompts private.

Over one quarter (27%) of respondents to this Twilo Segment survey think personalization has become less targeted in the past year. Unexpected. Less surprising: a majority say they buy more after a personalized experience (56%) but only a minority are comfortable with AI-based personalization using their data (41%). Companies are less conflicted: 92% are using AI-driven personalization and 80% say it drives higher spending.

Advertisers have grown more worried about cookie loss since last year (45% vs 38%), while fewer publishers are “very concerned” (14% from 25%). according to this DoubleVerify survey. Around 48% of both groups felt that first-party data will become more important, while around 23% expected a unified ID to replace cookie-based solutions.

Is it still news when a vendor announces a generative AI offering? Probably not, but Zeta Global does make some exceptionally broad promises about using it for pretty much every marketing role from business analyst and media strategist to campaign manager and retail merchandiser. So far, their tool only delivers marketing strategy recommendations but the more exciting features are on their roadmap.