CDP Institute

Lots of retail-related news today, Dear Reader,  Streaming TV leader Roku has partnered with grocery ordering and delivery service Instacart to help marketers measure the impact of their TV ads.  The only cookies involved here are the delicious kind you can eat.

Klarna is best known as a Buy Now Pay Later service, but its presence on retailer websites opens other opportunities. One is a retail media network, which it has just enhanced with a self-service ad buying platform. The company has also added an AI-powered personalized shopping feed, prefilled listings for second-hand marketplaces, and customized storefronts for creators.

Criteo isn’t exactly a retail media company, although it does leverage retailer transaction data to support ad targeting.  They’ve just placed their media buying app on the Shopify App Store, making it easier for Shopify merchants to purchase ads through Criteo.  This doesn’t mean that Shopify transactions are being shared with Criteo.

Meta may be under fire by regulators and distrusted by consumers, but never forget that its core advertising business is a gold mine.  The company reported $29.65 billion revenue for the first quarter of 2023.  That’s up 3% from the pandemic-depressed Q1 last year, which isn’t great but better than the year-on-year declines in every quarter since.

Meta would love to collect commissions on in-platform sales, a.k.a. social commerce. U.S. and European results have been mixed at best, although it’s booming in China. But this survey by Magna Media Trials and Reprise Commerce says things are better than they seem: 92% of respondents said they’d be willing to purchase on social if it offers good deals and real-time customer service, and 46% of U.S. respondents said they have already made a social commerce purchase.

If you need to be reminded what healthy growth looks like: Amazon reported a 21% year-on-year gain in Q1 retail media revenue, $9.5 billion.  Amazon accounts for 85% of the industry, according to eMarketer.  While some reports have predicted a slowdown in retail media, Skai takes a brighter view: 87% of advertisers plan to maintain or increase retail media spending this year.  Plot twist: funds for retail media most often come from the paid search budget, but are usually managed by ecommerce staff.

ChatGPT has been criticized for exposing information provided in user prompts, including some that’s confidential. They’ve just added a feature that lets users stop this from happening by blocking the system from using chat history to train itself. Another new feature lets users export and review data that ChatGPT has stored about their interactions.

If you think ChatGPT will have a big impact in the future, you’re wrong: it’s already happened. Sixty percent of respondents to this survey from education website Intelligent reported they know someone who has lost their job to AI, and 57% fear losing their own job. Ten percent have completed a ChatGPT course and 30% plan to take one before the year is out.

It’s hard to believe ChatGPT could be having so big an impact so quickly. But this research from OpenAI itself concludes that 80% of the U.S. workforce will have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by generative AI, and 19% will see 50% or more of their tasks affected. Even closer to home, Beantown Media Ventures found 29% of content marketers think AI will replace all writers in the next five years and another 40% think it will replace junior writers.

Airship has just released the “world’s first no-code native app experience editor”. Exactly how this differs from other no-code experience editors is not clear but, judging by the press release, the folks at Airship are super-excited about it. Apparently, marketers and product owners now have so much power that sparks fly from their fingertips.

Dust off that Walkman and pop in a Bee Gees cassette: Firstlogic, whose tech was cutting edge when disco was king, is replacing its venerable Match/Consolidate software with Match IQ, which they promise “goes well beyond the typical ‘merge/purge’ operation.” That’s a term I haven’t heard since my last trip to Danceteria.

If your musical reference point is closer to the Andrews Sisters, you may be nostalgic for the days when A.C. Nielsen’s radio and TV ratings were the Next Big Thing. Nielsen is still around, of course, and their 2023 Annual Marketing Report contains interesting data on channel spend and effectiveness. The headline that caught my eye was “Investment in martech is declining”, which is a bit misleading: planned spend is down at 24% of companies but up at 56%.