CDP Institute

HCLSoftware has “reimagined” its 26-year-old Unica marketing automation platform as a tool for shifting from an “attention economy” based on “clicks and eyeballs” to an “intelligence economy” based on “insight, engagement, and experience.” If that seems a bit abstract, you might rather learn that key features of what’s now Unica+ include autonomous AI agents for segmentation, content creation, and campaign measurement; a workbench for custom AI models; real time personalization; intent identification; and a unified customer profile.

It was literally just yesterday that WPP Media launched “the industry’s first Large Marketing Model” trained on “trillions of signals across more than 350 partners” to “continuously optimize audience segmentation, creative development, and media activation”. Today MiQ is offering MiQ Sigma, which “connects over 700 trillion signals across 300 diverse data feeds” to train models that allow programmatic ad buyers to “generate personas, build audiences, and create campaigns.” So now there are two.

After years of optimizing their websites for traditional search engines, marketers are scrambling to retain visibility in genAI search results. SEO veteran Conductor is stepping forward to help with Conductor AI, a content copilot that identifies content gaps and scores content for discoverability by genAI engines.

CDP Treasure Data is launching five new agentic AI suites for marketing, CX and customer service. Service AI Suite will support B2B sales teams and field service agents; Engagement AI Suite will support timely interactions with customers; Paid Media AI Suite will drive campaign performance; Creative AI Suite will develop personalized content; Personalization AI Suite will deliver content based on contextual data. Treasure Data also announced a Migration Agent to help customers move from legacy CDPs to Treasure Data.

The ultimate dream (or nightmare) for AI in marketing is one model to rule everything from insight generation to campaign execution and measurement. WPP Media has taken a giant step in that direction with Open Intelligence, a “universal model” using trillions of data signals from 350+ partners to predict audience behavior and marketing performance, enabling continuously optimized, personalized campaigns across all channels. The wide array of data sources will relieve dependence on identity data and help protect consumer privacy.

Another EU battlefront has opened for Amazon, with German regulators saying Amazon’s price controls on third-party sellers may break domestic and EU laws. Amazon uses algorithms to de-prioritize products perceived as over-priced in search results. Amazon is challenging these preliminary findings saying changes would be bad for customers.

Retail media promises mouth-wateringly precise audience segments based on retailers’ transaction data, but retailers’ own ad inventory is often limited. Pairzon, a retail-oriented CDP, has unveiled a Retail Media Solution that avoids this problem by sharing its segments with Meta, Google, TikTok, and other major ad platforms. It’s all privacy-safe, of course, and includes closed-loop attribution, tying ad impressions to physical or digital transactions.

Retail media is still growing but the industry spotlight is now moving on. “Contextual commerce” (or shoppable ads, if you prefer plain English) is a new rising star, now expanding beyond social media, display, and mobile to include Connected TV. In fact, 62% of respondents to a Digiday/Warner Bros. Discovery survey of 90 agencies, brands, retailers and marketers say they’re already leveraging shoppable ads on CTV, with 77% allocating more than 20% of their 2025 budget to CTV, up from 13% in 2024.

And what comes after shoppable ads? Glance AI, an InMobi subsidiary backed by Google, does away with ad placements entirely, replacing them with custom fashion recommendations on your phone or CTV home page. Glance’s AI examines consumer-uploaded selfies, scans 400+ online catalogs for fashions that fit the consumer’s personal style, and shows how the clothes would look on the consumer.

New media require new metrics. Value intelligence startup Pay-i has landed $4.9 million in seed funding to fill that gap for genAI. The solution provides a real-time dashboard that lets users assign dollar and time values to measurable genAI outcomes, comparing the performances of models, agents or prompts.

“Contextual commerce” is here to stay: within just the past month, 7.5 million U.S. households have purchased a physical product through a CTV ad, according to research and consultancy service Parks. That’s eight percent of households that watch streaming video. It’s still way short of the 24% that subscribed to one or other video service — the biggest type of transaction in streaming.

A new study published in Jama Internal Medicine compared responses to almost 200 patient questions by physicians and chatbots in a social media forum. In almost 80% of cases, evaluators preferred the longer and more empathetic responses by the bots (maybe doctors are just busier than bots?). The next step would be to use AI agents for this; after all, Cisco forecasts that AI assistants will be handling 68% of customer service in the tech sector by 2028.