CDP Institute

It’s an odd news day, Dear Reader, with the general items more interesting than the transactions.  To make room, I’ll combine the transactions here.  Social media management vendor Sprout Social has purchased.   AI-based sentimental analysis firm Repustate.  Oro has raised $13 million for its open-source B2B ecommerce platform.  Copilot announced a $10 million Series A to build client portals for service businesses.  Beaconstac has raised $25 million for QR codes, proving everything old is new.

In Big Tech Behaving Badly, we have news that Google will be forced to make major changes to its Android business model in India after losing an anti-trust appeal.  Meanwhile, Twitter’s latest questionable choice is to ban third-party clients .  And Jamie from our Department of the Obvious offers this University of Southern California study finding that the design of Facebook rewards users who spread fake news.

Looking at adtech: we have good news from the UK, where a joint ISBA and PwC study found unattributable programmatic ad spend dropped from 15% to 3% and the portion of revenue actually reaching publishers rose from 51% to 57%, compared with their 2020 study.  Winterberry Group pitches in with its massive, and fascinating, annual report on past and future ad spending. And LUMA offers its own magisterial review of digital media and marketing funding in 2022 (spoiler alert: it was down).

Microsoft is in the news today for a 10,000-person layoff, but we’re more interested in cool AI stuff, right?  They recently announced general availability of Azure OpenAI Service, which will make it easier for businesses to run all sorts of advanced machine learning models.  Well, not all sorts, since ChatGPT is notably excluded.  But they promise to add it soon.

There’s more to AI than ChatGPT.  Horizon Media has just launched an AI-based media optimization platform for ecommerce marketers who advertise through other retailers.  The new system, Neon, uses historical and real-time sales and campaign data to develop media plans, fine-tune spending in real time, and send the best product display page to each visitor.  The company promises a 20% or better revenue gain vs manual approaches.

Your own media plans may be above average, Dear Reader, but this CMO Council report finds two-thirds of marketers are less than very confident their current media strategy will produce the desired results.  Also: privacy ranks last on the list of obstacles to marketing results, while budget and talent are on top.  And: 20% have a data clean room and 24% plan to add one.

Optimove has been steadily expanding the message delivery services available within its product. Its latest addition is SMS, which joins existing options for email, website, mobile push, in-app messages, and digital ads. No word on when they’ll add digital out-of-home.

Google’s proposed Topics API targeting mechanism – which tagged users with a few interests based on recent site visits – always seemed questionable from a privacy standpoint. Sure enough, the technical standards arm of web governing body World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has rejected it. Coffin, meet nail.

TikTok has been under fire for sharing private information with Chinese government agencies. The company is reportedly attempting to appease lawmakers with a $1.5 billion ”transparency plan” for independent review of its code and video selection algorithms. The politics here probably matter more than any technical details, but it’s worth a try.

Netherlands-based CDP Invenna is merging with Human Inference, which offers data quality and identity resolution technology.  Both firms are owned by The Data Agency, which owns a number of customer data-related businesses.  Human Inference will be offered as a separate product and as a module within Invenna.

Data quality and master data management has remained the top priority for data users worldwide for six years running, according to this BARC survey.  Data culture, governance, visualization, and self-service analytics round out the top five.  Lots of interesting detail here by application, region, industry, best-in-class, company size, and user type.

I know you know that data is just one leg of the data, technology, and people tripod supporting business growth.  But if you need to convince a friend, this Accenture CEO study shows that focusing on data and technology alone yields a 4% productivity premium while focusing on all three yields an 11% premium.  Data, tech, and AI are tied with talent management as top growth drivers.