CDP Institute

Customer engagement platform Braze, which isn’t quite a CDP but builds unified customer profiles for its own activation components, announced an agreement to acquire AI decisioning company OfferFit for $325 million. OfferFit provides a multi-agent solution that recommends individual-level cross-channel customer journeys. It’s a big bet for Braze: the price is nearly 10% of the company’s $3.86 billion market cap.

Chord Commerce, a CDP for commerce brands, is much smaller than Braze but shares a scope ranging from customer data assembly to AI-powered insights, attribution, and activation.  They’ve just raised $5.5 million to further invest in AI-orchestrated cross-channel marketing.  The round brings total funding to $45.5 million.

Utiq offers addressable audiences based on identifiers collected (with user consent) by four European telcos. It just announced the successful integration of its technology with Adobe Real-Time CDP.  In one test campaign, Utiq’s first-party identifier combined with Authentic Audiences in the Adobe CDP to yield a 290% uplift in impressions in non-Chrome browsers and a 61% better re-identification rate than targeting with cookies.

With only eight days left until President Trump’s executive order reprieve of TikTok expires, Pew Research reports that only 34% of U.S. adults now support a ban, down from 50% two years ago. The number that believe TikTok poses a security threat has dipped ten points over the same period. Support for the ban has also declined in both parties.

Instacart has launched a suite of AI-powered tools to enhance campaign performance. These include Universal Campaigns which allows advertisers to create one campaign with a unified budget that automatically optimizes across various ad formats. Other tools are AI-powered landing pages, recommendations for campaigns and suggestions for product library enhancements.

Fifty-four percent of U.S. consumers don’t pay attention to brand if a product meets their needs according to a survey of some 2,000 U.S. consumers by SAP Emarsys. Indeed, 57% have switched to “own label” alternatives to brand and 55% find the quality comparable. Not surprising then that 88% of marketers say their engagement strategies need a rethink in 2025.

CDP Simon Data has announced the launch of Goals-Based Marketing, initially featuring an AI-powered segmentation workflow. The ultimate goal of this approach is to create revenue-generating customer experiences at scale. The new offering is driven by three AI agentic teams (Strategy Agents, Data Execution Agents, and Revenue Impact Agents) and features Smart Fields and Smart Segments, aimed at uncovering customer behavior patterns.

Meanwhile, Simon Property Group (no relation) is ingesting first-party data from its portfolio of some 200 shopping, dining, and entertainment mixed-use destinations into its media division. This will allow retailers to build target audiences based on Simon insights. The audiences can then be activated, either through the retailer’s own digital channels or through Simon’s nationwide in-mall retail media network.

AI can now be present throughout the entire media campaign lifecycle, from planning to analysis of results and recommendations according to the IAB’s 2025 State of Data Report. Not everyone is taking advantage, with 70% of brands, agencies and publishers not yet integrating AI across all facets of campaigns. Major hurdles are data readiness, security and fragmented tools, but 49% of brands, agencies and publishers are actively seeking to overcome them.

News organizations have long sought ways to make platforms like Meta and Google pay for the content they reproduce. Now Google says the value of news content is overrated, especially when it comes to ad revenue. A study conducted by Google in eight European countries found no change to Search ad revenue and less than 1% drop in usage when the content from 13,000 EU publishers was removed.

Shorly after Meta began rolling out its AI assistant across European markets it emerged that it lacks such key features as image generation and photo analysis. Because of privacy concerns, it’s a text-only version of the chatbot. And Meta emphasizes it was not trained on first-party data of EU users.

More than 60% of consumers resent brands placing the onus on them to protect their own data and privacy according to the latest Digital Trust Index report from Thales. More than 80% abandoned a brand last year because of privacy concerns. Nineteen percent learned that their personal data had been compromised in the past year and while banking remains the most trusted sector, less than a third of the 16-24 age group have faith in it (down from 44% last year).