CDP Institute

Amazon already has a far higher trust rating than almost anyone, so placing its Shop With Prime button on small retailers’ websites can only increase their sales. They just selected ecommerce tech vendor UpstarWorks to help expand the program. Is it rude to mention the deal also helps Amazon collect new customer data?

Who doesn’t love the consumer control provided by Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) program?  Mobile app advertisers and ad sellers who lose access to consumer data, that’s who.  This Appsumer report finds Apple itself is the biggest winner, growing its share of mobile app advertising from 10% in the second quarter of 2021 to 15% one year later, while Facebook’s share fell from 32% to 28%.

Web experimentation platform Optimizely is making new friends. They’ve just announced an integration with identity resolution vendor FullContact, which will enable Optimizely clients to identify individuals across platforms. Optimizely also announced its product is now available on Google Cloud Marketplace, deepening a strategic partnership announced in February.

Metadata helps B2B marketers optimize their ad buys, but it aims to become a much broader “Marketing Operating System for B2B”.  They raised a $40 million Series B in March to support the vision and just spent an unannounced portion to purchase Reactful, which provides website personalization and Account Based Marketing features.  More to come, no doubt.

ZineOne is yet another web personalization tool, specializing in personalized shopping experiences for anonymous website visitors.  Experiences can be tailored using in-session behavior can begin after as few as five clicks.  They just raised a $28 million Series C, bringing total funding to $43 million.

The e-commerce pie isn’t shrinking but growth has slowed as the pandemic tapers down and inflation heats up.  This puts Amazon and Shopify in tighter competition.  The latest skirmish is a warning to Shopify merchants that installing Amazon’s Buy with Prime button violates the Shopify Terms of Service and could lead to fraudulent orders, stolen customer data, incorrect charges, and hair loss.  Okay, they don’t mention hair loss but I think it’s implied.

Online grocery shopping is at special risk as buyers return to squeezing melons in person.  Instacart’s response is to evolve from a shopping service to a “grocery technology company”.  They just announced their second acquisition in a week, this time of Rosie, an e-commerce platform that mostly serves independent grocers.

When the going gets tough, Meta runs away as fast as it can.  Their response to e-commerce challenges is to scale back Instagram’s shopping pages and refocus on ad sales.  The move comes one month after Meta-owned Facebook dropped its own live shopping product.

It’s sadly obvious that you can make money telling lies online, but there’s also a business in telling the truth.  Credibility rating service The Factual does that, using AI systems that rate news source credibility without attempting to check specific claims.  The eight-person company was just purchased by Yahoo, which will use it to rate online news articles.

Social media sites are often, and rightly, criticized for failing to spread misinformation.  YouTube just announced its efforts for the upcoming U.S. elections, which will focus on recommending content from authoritative sources like PBS and The Wall Street Journal, and offering “information panels” with links to voting information.  They’re also “identifying borderline content and keeping it from being widely recommended” which isn’t exactly the same as labeling or blocking it altogether.

Taboola is intercepting users before they visit any web site by placing a news feed on home screens on Samsung, Xioami, Oppo, and other smartphones.  The links will go to a web page that features advertising and then send users to the original news sources, which will be Taboola-curated reliable news sources.   This entirely avoids the challenge of moderating user-sourced content that plagues social media.

The title of this Acxiom survey says personalization but CDP is the star of the show. Download for lots of juicy info about CDP deployment, use cases, benefits, obstacles, and more. Fun fact: more companies have deployed a CDP (43%) than marketing automation (42%), loyalty system (37%) or consent manager (36%).