CDP Institute

Tighter money calls for better measurement.  DoubleVerify has launched a new “Attention Lab” that looks beyond clicks and viewability to assess exposure and engagement.  These are apparently less disrupted by new privacy rules and, one hopes, do a better job of predicting business impact.

IAB Tech Lab is doing its part to improve measurement by extending its Open Measurement SDK to cover Connected TV.  The SDK helps publishes integrate with multiple measurement providers, making it easier for advertisers to apply their measurement tools of choice.  I needn’t remind you that Connected TV is one of the hottest, and most fragmented, new advertising categories.  But I just did.

You may recall Wednesday’s report that IT leaders expect higher budgets despite recession worries. This Twilio Segment survey found that marketers are not as confident: 63% expect their martech budget to fall in the next twelve months. A whopping 83% expect to simplify their martech stack while 57% say they’re spending on ineffective tools. Still, 71% are prioritizing first party data and 82% believe companies with excellent customer data will grow faster than companies without it.

Integrated marketing agency Alloy also found that marketers are expecting a more hostile environment.  The audience of tech marketers reported shifting their focus from acquiring new customers to increasing revenue from existing customers.  Two surveys with the same result counts as a trend, right?

Who knew IT folk were so cheerful?  Splunk found data innovation leaders are more likely to say they can’t keep up with data growth (67%) than intermediates (41%) or beginners (15%), but are somehow less worried about it: leaders said they use more of their data and do a better job at real-time segmentation and recommendations than the others.  Leaders also saw more opportunities to use sales, customer, and transaction data in the future.

Those nice people at Optimizely are terribly excited about Real-Time Segmentation, their “new, first-of-its-kind offering that allows marketers to segment customers in the moment of engagement to deliver highly relevant, personalized digital experiences.” Exactly what’s different from other real-time personalization products isn’t clear, and you’ll have to wait to judge for yourself: it’s available only in beta to select customers.

Personalization and experimentation vendor AB Tasty is also claiming a first: it just acquired site search and recommendation vendor Epoq, which it says makes it the “first in our class to offer the market a consolidated approach to delivering relevant and consistent digital customer experiences.”  The main story here is bundling of experiment-based optimization, recommendations, and search.

Persado goes beyond “first” to call itself the “only” company to generate personalized marketing messages with a “transformer model fully connected and pre-trained on behavioral data.” They say this “selects the words that will drive action” in ways that other systems do not, and who am I to argue? (Learn about transformer models.) What’s new today is they’ve added an API to embed this magic in other vendors’ systems.

The EU has completed passage of its Digital Services Act with final approval by the European Council. The act targets unfair practices by big tech vendors. Contrast that to the big U.S. antitrust bill that’s stalled in the U.S. Senate. (Thanks, Chuck Schumer.)  Don’t confuse it with a much smaller bill approved by the House last week.

The online advertising industry is rife with fraud, perhaps because it’s dominated by big tech and perhaps despite it.  Either way, ads.txt is one of the more effective measures at limiting the problem.  But this study by Sellers.Guide found errors in tens of thousands of ads.txt files, although the report doesn’t indicate what fraction of the total that represents.

In somewhat cheerier news, Spiceworks Ziff Davis reports that most companies (51%) plan to increase IT spending next year, even those even more (83%) are worried about a recession.  Unfortunately for many marketers, the focus of spending will be infrastructure improvements not marketing.  If you want a clearer sense of IT priorities: personalized advertising ranks second-to-last on a list of ten ways organizations plan to use artificial intelligence.

Venture funding may not quite be flowing like wine anymore, but the tap isn’t completely shut.  Klaus, which uses AI to review customer support conversations so managers don’t have to, just closed a €12 million Series A.  Klaus is based in Estonia and has an exceptionally cute cat logo, if you’re tracking either of those dimensions.