CDP Institute

Surprising absolutely no one, Microsoft is exploring ways to include ads in responses from its chat-formatted Bing search engine. The company also said it’s exploring ways to send a bit of revenue to the publishers whose content forms the basis for the chat results. What’s that story about a thief who robs a church and drops a few coins in the donation box on the way out?

Search ad king Google will surely place ads in its own chat results when it’s ready. In the meantime, they’ve launched an Ads Transparency Center that gives consumers information about the ads they are shown. The center also lets consumers set options that offer some control over how they’re targeted.

NASCAR has nothing on The CMO Survey, whose current cover credits Duke Fuqua, Deloitte, and the American Marketing Association as co-sponsors. The latest edition shares the usual insights into spending trends, management methods, and hiring. Martech fans may be sad to learn that CMOs rank tech and data last among revenue drivers, while placing talent at the head of the list.

You can add privacy to your worries about ChatGPT. Italian data protection authority Garante has banned ChatGPT parent OpenAI from processing Italian users’ personal data, on the grounds that it does this without legal basis and also that it doesn’t verify users are under 13 years old.  OpenAI has blocked access to ChatGPT in Italy in response.

Concerns about ChatGPT are one tiny tile in the great mosaic of worries about tech in general.  This Morning Consult report offers a broader view and it’s more mixed than you might think: yes, U.S. consumers have become more hostile recently, but 58% still say their impression of big tech companies is favorable.  There does seem to be a bi-partisan desire for more regulation but that doesn’t guarantee that Congress will act.

Consumer attitudes towards business use of their data continue to show the usual conflict between privacy and personalization.  This Twilio report shows 95% of consumes want more control over their data but 66% will stop using a brand if their experience isn’t personalized.  Looking past talk to action: data deletion requests on Twilio Segment rose 69% in the past year.

Another day, another CDP offering data warehouse integration. Today’s subject in mParticle, which has introduced Warehouse Sync to share data with cloud data warehouses like Snowflake. Like other CDP vendors with similar offerings, mParticle sets itself up to provide the data warehouse with unified profiles they lack and to feed profiles to downstream applications using its existing connectors.

When EU regulators ruled in December that Meta lacked legal basis for behavioral ad targeting, it was just a matter of time before they had to change their approach. That time has come: starting next week, Meta will give EU users the option to opt out of targeting based on behaviors. Consumers elsewhere will still be denied the choice.

Regulators aren’t the only masters that Meta must serve.  Advertisers pay the rent, and they’re increasingly worried about brand safety and suitability.  To appease that dragon, Meta has just released tools to give them more control over what kind of content their ads appear near.  AI-driven, of course.

Twilio has launched a real-time identity resolution solution, Segment Unify, that generates unified customer profiles within the Segment CDP and shares them with external systems via a Reverse ETL capability. Highlighting Reverse ETL features has become an increasingly popular tactic among CDP vendors who face aggressive competition from stand-alone Reverse ETL products.

Many SaaS companies are currently shifting from feature-based to usage-based pricing. But why choose? Just-launched billing platform Orb lets them offer either or both. In addition to flexibility, the system saves SaaS companies the cost of developing their own pricing systems. The company just closed a $14 million Series A, bringing total funding to $19.1 million.

You knew this was coming: an AI-based service that tailors spoken advertising to the current context of the listener. Instreamatic uses location, time of day, current activity, and other variables as inputs to an auto-generated ad script that’s read in an auto-generated voice in a podcast, game or other medium. The creep factor is strong in this one.