CDP Institute

You won’t be surprised that the main product theme at HubSpot’s annual Inbound conference is AI, and “hybrid human-AI teams” in particular. The most CDP-relevant announcement is a new Data Hub, which uses AI to assemble, clean, and activate data from structured, unstructured and external sources.

Google continued its Very Good Week with a report that Apple may use Google technology for an AI-powered web search feature. Apple has glaringly lagged in its AI efforts, but apparently intends to build an answer engine to compete with OpenAI and Perplexity.

Even Google hits an occasional speed bump: a California jury assessed it with $425 million in compensatory damages for collecting data on users who had opted out of app activity tracking. Then again, the class action plaintiffs had asked for more than $30 billion in damages so maybe that’s really a win. In any event, the result will probably be appealed.

Audience measurement vendor Comscore has launched a new venture to build privacy-safe audiences from privacy-unsafe customer data. The trick is to match IDs from third-party audiences to Comscore’s own consumer panel, and then build a look-alike model using non-personal attributes. The dozen or so partners providing the input audiences include Circana, Dynata, Eyeota, Polk Automotive Solutions, Symphony Health, and TransUnion.

It’s been a good week for Google, if not necessarily the rest of us. Fresh from a U.S. court ruling effectively preserving its search money, the company learned that European Union regulators have paused an expected fine for adtech abuses. No reason was given although fear of U.S. retaliation is suspected.

Speaking of monopolists, Amazon wants to capture every purchase possible, even from customers standing in a retail store. To help things along, they’ve enhanced their Lens visual shopping tool with Lens Live, which lets users research a product by pointing at it with their camera. This removes the step of uploading an image. As TechCrunch points out, Google and Pinterest already have similar features.

That whizzing noise you just heard was the bullet that Google dodged in the judge’s ruling on its search anti-trust case. The court won’t require Google to divest Chrome and lets it continue to pay device makers for loading Chrome on their systems. Google does have to share some search data with competitors but not on a regular basis. Appeals are certain.

Berlin-based Zeotap is one of the few CDPs that also provide clients with third-party audience data. Or they were: Zeotap has sold its data business to Berlin-based Roqad, which calls itself “Europe’s largest trusted identity aggregator and data onboarding partner.” Roqad also gains Zeotap’s integrations with Amazon DSP, The Trade Desk, Adform, and other platforms.

Things are picking up on the acquisition front. Marketing performance measurement vendor Uptempo has purchased marketing mix modeling provider OptiMine. Price was not announced; LinkedIn says that OptiMine has 29 employees and Uptempo has 282.

We’re all about trends today, Dear Reader. First is the trend for CDPs to appear in cloud vendor marketplaces. Meiro has just landed in the Google Cloud Marketplace, meaning customers can manage their Meiro instance in their own Google Cloud space rather than relying on Meiro’s SaaS hosting.

Next we have the trend of vendors showing clients how their brand appears in AI search results. The latest to join that party is LLM Scout, which offers weekly updates with trend analysis, competitive benchmarking, source transparency, and customizable prompts. It reports on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

Finally, there’s the trend of using AI agents to create end-to-end marketing campaigns. MarkApp, which offers a contextual ad marketplace for CTV, mobile and web, has launched a collection of five AI agents for campaign building, brand-safe placements, real-time optimization, creative testing, and insights. Apparently each of these is activated by a human, so the process isn’t fully automated…yet.