CDP Institute

Maybe it’s National Stick to Your Knitting Day: Meredith Corporation is selling its local TV stations for $2.7 billion, leaving it free to concentrate on its core publishing brands, which include People, Better Homes & Gardens, and Allrecipes.  Those may sound old-fashioned but Meredith already makes more from digital advertising than print advertising.  This might be a good time to sell: TV viewing time dropped 9% in the first quarter of this year and is expected to fall further.

Pandemic-driven pressures for productivity may have broken down marketers’ resistance to AI-based creative.  This Bynder report finds just 1% of marketers think branding can’t be automated, compared with 23% last year.  A whopping 89% believe technology will help creativity at the companies, although (in a different question) 29% said automation will diminish creativity and 28% said it will eliminate jobs.

Ad holding giant WPP has combined 700 people in its data specialist groups at GroupM and Wunderman Thompson to create a new global company called Choreograph. The goal is to take help clients make better use of their first party data for audience insights, identity solutions, media optimization, and predictive analytics.

Verizon Media and VIZIO have partnered to better exploit data from VIZIO’s 18 million smart TV for ad targeting.   The deal will let Verizon supplement its own customer information with VIZIO’s Inscape data on TV viewership, for better ad targeting and measurement.

Here’s another option for TV audience targeting: OpenAP has launched OpenID, which combines individual-level data from TransUnion and TV household data from Tru Optik.  Advertisers will use the data to define audiences and then match them against viewership data and platform IDs to build media plans.  The OpenIDs will also be interoperable with Unified ID 2.0 created by The Trade Desk.

Google Cloud keeps adding partners that expand its customer data management capabilities. The latest is Acxiom, which will make its marketing analytics, data management, and compiled data sets available in the Google Cloud environment. The deal is mostly about Acxiom running its services on Google Cloud, not making Acxiom data more easily available.

Contextual advertising is being reborn as an alternative to cookie-based ad targeting. Adtech vendor Criteo is improving contextual results by adding insights based on each publisher’s first-party purchase data. Specifically, it will identify the content related to each purchase, find other pages with similar contents, and show ads with relevant product recommendations. Old-school contextual targeting wasn’t refined with purchase history.

Ad industry group ANA has issued a Request for Proposal for a study of programmatic media transparency, which the ANA described as “riddled with material issues including thin transparency, fractured accountability, and mind-numbing complexity.” ANA CEO Bobo Liodice added that “Marketers do not have a fully transparent line of sight into their programmatic supply chains”. Jamie in our Department of the Obvious is impressed.

Market research firm Numerator is joining the omni-channel measurement wars with a new marketing share measurement system that fixes the problems with retail sales data, which now capture less than half of all purchases. The system achieves this magic by using a 1+ million household panel. Numerator was bought earlier this month by Kantar for $1.5 billion.

MailChimp, which has already expanded beyond email into marketing automation, is now adding an online storefront and appointment-booking. A free-ish version of the storefront has no monthly fee, although users pay 2% of revenues. Or, users can pay $10 or $29 per month in exchange for lower transaction rates.

Omni-channel messaging platform MessageBird announced a $600 million acquisition of email optimization platform SparkPost, $1 billion Series C extension (from the previous $200 million), and entry to the U.S. market. We also just learned that MessageBird bought the Hull.io CDP at the end of March, along with video platform 24sessions. The deals strengthen MessageBird’s competitive position against Twilio, which you will recall bought the Segment CDP last year.

Adobe has announced several enhancements to its Real-time CDP, including: Segment Match, a second-party data sharing feature; Look-Alike Segments, which identifies customers similar to a sample group; and B2B enhancements including a combination of individual and account profiles.  Nothing revolutionary here but their product is continuing to mature.