CDP Institute

The slow motion train wreck continues at X-formerly-Twitter.  Analytics platform Tracer reports the cost per thousand fell 35% from last June to this June, suggesting advertisers are pulling out.  The click-through rate, a sign of user engagement, fell by 60% over the same period.

Adtech platform Taboola has struck a deal to sell advertising on the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps. Taboola is known for selling so-called “chumbox” ads with clickbait headlines that typically appear at the foot of web content. However, it also has quality controlled programs like Taboola Select and may well be able to funnel premium ads to the Apple apps.

Just over half of CEOs are hiring for new generative AI-related roles, according to international survey samples totaling over 3,000 by IBM. Although more expect to cut staff (47%) than add it (40%) due to genAI, the net effect is still expected to be an increase in the total number of jobs.

Reverse ETL?  Customer data activation platform?  Composable CDP?  Census has called itself all of these, but what it does by any name is help marketers pull customer data from a cloud warehouse.  They just bought Fulcrum, which will add AI-led audience segmentation to the Census platform.  While many reverse ETL have added data capture and management features, Census is expanding in the other direction.

An Optimizely survey of 1,000 marketing, IT and other executives finds a worrying 86% say they don’t have the personalization capabilities that their strategies demand. Ignoring this or hoping to fix it, 62% are upping their budget this year. With 75% of consumers more likely to respond to personalized messaging, giving up is not an option.

Jamie, Senior Intern at the CDP Institute Department of the Obvious, gleefully reports that Google researchers have found “nefarious” (wicked or criminal) AI-generated content may sow distrust among users. He is impressed with the obviousness of their concern that people may come to be suspicious of content generated by systems that have no ethics and no care for truth vs. falsehood, and that AI could even disturb the “collective understanding of socio-political reality or scientific consensus.”

Optimizely’s SaaS CMS, previewed by some customers in beta, is now generally available. It is a headless CMS, signalling increased interest in delivering content across multiple channels and devices. It includes a new visual builder allowing drag-and-drop creation of content.

Maybe marketers are ready to say goodbye to cookies with 52% of those surveyed by Ascend2 citing first-party data as their primary source for data-driven marketing. Eighteen percent make second-party data (partner-shared) data their top pick, with third-party trailing at 8%. Interestingly, zero-party data beats third-party at 12%.

Consumers are losing interest in just about every media channel, digital and analog, according to a tracker survey run by Attest on its platform. Less TV is watched, including streaming TV, less music is being streamed, social media use is down (for 35 year olds and up, anyway) and forget about radio. Which leaves the question: what is everyone doing on their phone all the time?

CDP Tealium has entered into a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement with AWS for AWS to host Tealium instances globally.  The arrangement will make it easier for companies in highly regulated industries to deploy Tealium in local data centers.

Klaviyo AI, launched in February has added three new features.  Most notable is Flows AI, which will create complex campaign flows in seconds based only on a simple natural language prompt. Other additions will select the best A/B test option for individual subscribers and analyze review sentiments at scale.

Digital ad spend is forecast to grow 16% to around $63 billion, according to this IAB report. This is about the same as last year’s growth and lower than 2022’s jump of 21%, but it will outpace the growth in total advertising spending. For the first time, digital video ad spend will exceed linear TV 52% to 48%.  Raise your hand if you remember linear TV.