CDP Institute

Prescient AI collects data about a company’s sales and other business results and correlates that with advertising programs. It’s not as precise as direct attribution via third-party cookies or pixels, but also doesn’t rely on those being available – which they increasingly are not. Prescient just raised a $4.5 million seed round, on top of $1.7 million pre-seed funding in 2021.

Despite years of warnings, 75% of respondents to this Adobe survey still rely heavily on third-party cookies: 45% spend half or more of their budgets on cookie-based activations. A shocking 41% are still not working to develop cookie-free alternatives, even though over three-quarters say cookie deprecation will hurt their business and they recognize at least 30% of their potential market already exists in cookieless environments.

Third-party data and third-party cookies are not the same thing. Just over half (53%) of the respondents to this Datonics study are using third-party data to target their programmatic ad audiences, from an average of 11.9 data providers. Much of that data will remain available after third-party cookies are gone. Still, 69% of the respondents are concerned that privacy changes will disrupt their activities.

This was going to be an item about TikTok partnering with Dentsu for campaign performance tracking, which is an interesting illustration of the trend towards new campaign measurement methods.  But the Biden Administration has apparently just given TikTok an ultimatum to sell its U.S. business or face a ban on U.S. operations.  That’s probably more important.

Like TikTok, Roku and Best Buy both collect tons of personal data. But they’re not Chinese-owned, so most politicians don’t care. The two firms are collaborating to sell Roku-brand TVs and to target ads on those TVs using their combined data.

Mastercard is another firm that collects huge amounts of individual-level data without raising any political eyebrows. Personalization platform Dynamic Yield, which Mastercard owns, will be using that data to create new advertising audiences and individual-level personalized messages.

The head-spinning pace of development in the generative AI space continues. Latest news is Google Cloud offering API access to its foundation AI models, which will enable developers to easily embed them within their own products. Separately, Google announced it is offering test versions of AI-based features such as image generation, copywriting, and categorization in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and other productivity tools.

Private equity buyers continue to take advantage of perceived bargains among public martech vendors. The latest deal with a $4.6 billion purchase of event management software vendor Cvent by Blackstone. Cvent has changed hands more often than a 2002 Toyota, originally going public in 2013, then being purchased by Vista Equity Partners in 2016, and going public again in 2021.

The French martech industry is a bit separate from the rest of the world. Paris-based Splio offers marketing automation and personalization under the banner of “Individuation”, with 400+ retailers as clients. They just bought Tinyclues, a leading French AI-based prediction engine.

Experience management vendor Qualtrics is being purchased by private investment firm Silver Lake for approximately $12.5 billion in cash. Qualtrics was purchased for $8 billion by SAP in 2018, and then spun off as a separate company in 2020. SAP had announced it was exploring a sale of its Qualtrics stake in January, so the deal is not much of a surprise.

Momentive, which owns SurveyMonkey, is being acquired by a consortium of private investors led by Symphony Technology Group. Rumors began flying about this deal in October.

“Charm offensive” isn’t in the playbook at Meta, which has announced it will block access to Canadian news sites if the country passes its proposed Online News Act in current form. The law would require Meta to pay news organizations when someone posts a link to their materials. A similar threat failed spectacularly in Australia last year but that isn’t deterring Meta from trying again.