CDP Institute

The martech universe grew 9% to 15,384 companies, according to the latest Scott Brinker/Frans Riemersma State of Martech report. The study includes a 96-person survey showing the share of B2C and mixed B2C/B2B companies with a CDP at the center of their stack fell by nearly 10% since 2024. But closer analysis suggests what’s really happening is companies are switching to CDPs inside customer-facing systems.

In a new district court filing, the DOJ has proposed that Google divest itself of ad exchange product AdX and pursue a phased sale of ad server DoubleClick for Publishers in order to restore competition in the adtech space. This follows a decision by the judge finding Google guilty of acquiring and maintaining monopoly power in digital advertising. Google argues the measures would harm advertisers and publishers.

StackAdapt will integrate email marketing and a first-party Data Hub into its programmatic advertising platform. This will enable users to activate email campaigns alongside programmatic campaigns in display, TV, video and other media. The email solution is supported by Data Hub which uses first-party data to orchestrate customer journeys and measure outcomes.

You might think that every CDP can integrate external data these days, but that’s not necessarily true. So let’s report that BlueConic has added Secure Data Sharing for Snowflake, which means it can connect directly to governed data within Snowflake without exporting or copying. This was one of a number of recent announcements from BlueConic, including the adoption of a new descriptor for their offering, Customer Growth Engine.

No fewer than 92% of analytics and IT leaders say the need for trustworthy data is greater than ever, with 87% pointing to AI as driving its importance. While 57% of those data analytics and IT leaders have full confidence in their data’s accuracy, just 45% of marketing leaders feel the same. Across 10,000 respondents to the Salesforce survey, there was general agreement that security threats were a challenge to good data management (that doesn’t mean hide it all away in silos — see below).

Jamie from our Department of the Obvious ran into the office the other day waving this report from Adobe, which surveyed 3,200 CX professionals to discover that personalization is hard if customer data is siloed. Specifically, two-thirds believe data siloes block personalized engagement at critical points in the customer journey. Sixty-four percent of senior executives cite security and governance issues as reasons for the silos; 48% admit their data is a mess.

Data movement platform Fivetran has signed an agreement to acquire composable CDP Census. With the acquisition, Fivetran will be able to support the movement of governed, automated, and real-time data across the enterprise stack, from source systems to data platforms and back into business applications. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“This is an injunction, not a negotiation,” said an Oakland district judge, referring to an order that she has found Apple violated. The order had required Apple to allow greater competition in its app store (it was recently fined by the EU for similar misconduct). The judge referred the company to federal prosecutors for a criminal contempt investigation.

Mastercard, PayPal and Visa each independently announced this week that they are entering the agentic commerce space. Essentially this means that AI agents will be able to make purchases from user accounts (within the governance of strict controls like what to buy and how much to spend). While consumers appreciate help, it’s not clear they really want purchase decisions made for them.

Google is introducing channel-level reporting to its centralized campaign management solution Performance Max. Also coming, full search terms reporting and reporting on the performance of individual assets. Channel reporting will provide a granular view of campaigns across Google platforms including clicks, conversions and cost.

Instacart is acquiring cloud-based grocery retail ecommerce platform Wynshop. The deal is expected to help build Instacart’s grocery retail partnerships. Wynshop also brings to the table AI-powered search featuring grocery-specific product ontology.

Sixty percent of business leaders believe their data is not ready for genAI, according to a new report from the CMO Council. Data reliability tops the list of most cited genAI challenges (69%) while the number one data quality challenge is the existence of siloes. Still, almost 80% believe genAI will deliver a competitive advantage over the next 18 months.