CDP Institute

Data access vendor Hightouch has released Personalization API, which provides real-time access to cloud databases.  Don’t get too excited: the data will only be as current as the underlying data warehouse, which is rarely itself updated in real time.  And, as the company notes in a very interesting accompanying blog post, the data is actually loaded into an intermediate “distributed, multi-region data store”, not read from the warehouse directly.

This IAB report provides an in-depth look at the super-hot topic of Data Clean Rooms.   Nearly two-thirds (64%) of respondents said they had one, with privacy and data activation the main applications.  The report cautions that clean rooms take a lot of money (average $376,000 per year), staff (49% have six or more dedicated employees) and time (up to two years to deploy).   Also stats here on CDP deployment (72%), cost ($437,000 per year) and satisfaction (60%).

I no longer use Twitter, but apparently it has become the “free-for-all hellscape” that Elon Musk promised to avoid.  Advertisers who support this can limit the damage to their brands with new services from Double Verify and Integral Ad Science.  Both measure the content that’s adjacent to brand ads, although they’re only reporting after the damage is done.

The U.S. Department of Justice yesterday filed its second big anti-trust lawsuit against Google.  This one targets Google’s digital advertising business, while the 2020 lawsuit focused on search marketing.  The 155-page complaint offers a step-by-step history of Google’s ad-related activities and demands that Google divest its ad server and ad exchange businesses.

Simon Data has launched Activate, a no-code tool that lets marketers combine data from Snowflake and other sources to build profiles and customer segments.  This is an extension of Simons’s current Snowflake-based approach.  It puts Simon on-trend with other CDP vendors who are combining data in the CDP with data held in external systems.

This Twilio Segment report provides an inside-out view of industry trends, based on use of the Segment platform.  Key findings include growth among point solutions and data warehouses as consumers of CDP data, a year-on-year doubling of data deletion requests by consumers, and continued dominance of analytical over personalization applications.  Fun fact: 53% of Twilio Segment customers connect with a data warehouse destination.

Customer data matching expert Lotame has launched Spherical, a “next-generation data platform” that will make it easier for companies to connect their first-party data to other sources for enrichment, modeling, and advertising activation. What’s new here is connectors for CDPs and company data warehouses.

We usually link to company websites when possible, but causaLens has what appears to be an entirely non-functional cookie consent option banner, so I’ll avoid it. Hopefully their “causal AI” tech works better, since they just launched it officially. The promise is to build AI models that identify cause-and-effect relationships and use them to make better business decisions.

The cause-and-effect link between greenhouse gases and global warming is well established, although the contribution of digital advertising seems more questionable. But enough ad-folk worry about it that IAB Tech Lab has launched a Green Supply Path Initiative to help programmatic advertisers measure their impact and, at least as important, show that They Care.

Hi, it’s Jamie, Senior Intern at the CDP Institute Department of the Obvious. The boss won’t be in today – something about gambling debts – so I’m writing the newsletter. We’ll start with this study from Marigold, formerly CM Group, which reports that discounts are the most common reason customers will share their data (93%). Non-obvious findings include: 25% use a privacy-centric alternative browser and 59% will pay more to buy from a preferred brand. Worth a look.

The folks at Edelman Trust Barometer get a special Obvious Perseverance Award for asking the same questions and getting the same answers year after year. Their latest report shows that trust continues its long-term decline, polarization continues to increase, and business remains the most trusted institution. If you prefer non-obvious information, download for details about attitudes in different countries, economic concerns, and how business should address social issues.

This Thoughtworks report gives more insight into business and responsibility. Sadly, the results are not particularly obvious: 73% of senior executives think that responsible technology will eventually be as important as business and financial considerations. Almost as many (67%) have some type of responsible tech guidelines already in place. Who knew?