CDP Institute

Apart from some pesky AI gurus who think it might destroy humanity, pretty much everyone else is excited to see what generative AI tools like ChatGPT do next.  This Botco survey finds that 73% of marketers are already using it to create some type of content, and 66% of users see a positive return on investment.  Training, cost and privacy concerns are the biggest roadblocks.

AI should eventually help IT teams manage data more smoothly, but right now they are one pack of unhappy campers: as this report from StreamSets puts it, “69% are frustrated non-data experts think you can click a button and data magically appears” and “59% say line of business owners are ‘blissfully unaware’ of how hard it is for IT to deliver data”.  In a companion report, 95% say line of business teams creating their own datasets creates problems including inaccurate data, non-compliant use, data breaches, and new data silos.

The data managers interviewed for Monte Carlo weren’t quite so self-pitying, but they did see lots of problems: downtime lost to data problems is up 86% year over year, time to resolve data incidents rose 66%, and – insult to injury – 74% said most data problems are identified first by business stakeholders, up from 47% last year.  The size of the task is daunting: 27% of companies manage more than 100 tables in their data warehouse, lake, or lakehouse.

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.