CDP Institute

Let’s look today at some of the more innovative applications of AI in martech. We’ll start with an alliance between digital experience platform Viafoura and audience engagement reporter Futuri. Their combined system monitors more than 250,000 web sources to find trends, understand what audiences care about, and generate content that audiences will find appealing.

Markup AI (formerly Acrolinx) checks that content meets brand standards and can re-write it if necessary. This addresses a key roadblock to deploying AI-created content at scale. They just launched with $27.5 million in new financing.

Later also helps companies to maintain brand standards. It’s has just launched Brand Suitability Insights, which assesses creators for both content fit and likely return on investment. The new feature is part of Later’s integrated platform to manage everything from creator discovery to content scheduling to ROI measurement.

Snowflake-oriented CDP Simon Data was warehouse-centric before “composable CDP” became a thing. They’ve now continued at the cutting edge of the industry by renaming themselves Simon AI and adding a slew of AI features for personalization and agent-based workflows.

Nothing says “cutting edge” right now as much letting agents buy things on behalf of customers. Google just announced a new specification to support this, in collaboration with 60 industry partners including merchants and financial institutions. In a less savory illustration of market power, they also just set a default value of $220 per visit for Return on Ad Spend and automated ad spend optimization, regardless of an advertiser’s actual business results.

Data breaches are unfortunately so common that they rarely qualify as news. But when the FBI singles out one product as particularly at risk, it’s worth noting. Salesforce has just achieved that sad distinction due to a flaw in Salesloft Drift that opened a pathway to Salesforce data.

BrightEdge reports that, despite huge growth, AI search engines still provide less than 1% of website referral traffic. You might think that’s a reason to ignore your ranking in AI search engines, but BrightEdge argues those rankings are still important because the main role of AI search is discovery, not referrals. Seems like a testable hypothesis. What we know for certain is that over-all traffic has dropped as users switch from traffic-generating traditional search to traffic-stifling AI search engines.

Netflix and Amazon compete for the same ad budgets, but that hasn’t stopped Netflix from making its ad inventory available through the Amazon DSP. Netflix gets more revenue; Amazon gets more inventory; advertisers get better targeting by leveraging Amazon data. Everybody wins unless you’re an Amazon competitor.

You knew Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement of copyright infringement claims came too easily, right? Sure enough, the judge in the case found the details were too vague to accept the deal as proposed. This will likely drag on for a long time; we’ll let you know if a final settlement actually is reached.

Adverity ingests, unifies, and shares customer (and other) data, although it seems to lack the real-time data access needed to qualify fully as a CDP. What it does have is a new AI-powered analytics layer that lets users make conversational queries about their data and provides agents to handle complex chores such as preparing data sets for marketing mix models.

In the strange bedfellows department, a beta test by commerce media platform Criteo lets it place Google Search ads on retailer websites. Everybody wins: retailers sell more ads, Criteo presumably gets some commissions, and Google gets both revenue and delicious customer data.

Brands often struggle to understand which ads resulted in retail sales. Pinterest is narrowing the gap with “where-to-buy links” in Pinterest image ads. These let users select a retailer and automatically add the selected item to their shopping cart, enabling Pinterest to share the connection with its advertisers.