CDP Institute

Meta has begun rolling out its AI assistant across more than 40 European countries. It blames delays in the rollout on Europe’s “complex regulatory system.” The assistant will be available in six languages, initially on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp Messenger.

In an extension of the retail media network concept, Best Buy Ads’ new Social+ tool will allow brands to automatically layer Best Buy’s first-party consumer data over the Advantage+ shopping campaigns that Meta runs on Facebook and Instagram. The campaigns will connect back to Best Buy’s website, app and in-store sales data providing insights on what is driving sales. Long-term, the aim is to make the solution available on non-Meta platforms.

Almost 90% of the 700 mobile marketers surveyed by Liftoff say their 2025 app ad budgets remain the same or larger than last year. Time spent on non-gaming apps has remained steady or grown across most top markets. Non-gaming apps have been a growing share of the market for the last two years.

Preliminary findings by the European Commission state that Apple and Google are in violation of the EU’s Digital Markets Act. Among the findings, Google Search is accused of prioritizing Google’s own products and services in results; Apple is instructed to improve interoperability between iOS and third-party devices. The companies now have an opportunity to respond.

IAB Tech Lab has launched Trusted Server as an open-source industry framework aimed at giving publishers full control over ad monetization. Trusted Server supports the management of ad requests, auctions and creative entirely in publishers’ own server-side framework. This should reduce reliance on browsers like Chrome and Safari that restrict publishers’ visibility into their own audience data in the name of privacy.

Although 63% of more than 500 marketers surveyed by Jasper use gen AI, only 49% are attempting to measure ROI on their AI investment. Of the 49% not measuring ROI, 22% plan to in 2025. The main drawbacks the survey found in using gen AI were output quality (19%) and the need for data privacy (21%).

A Florida district judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by tech industry associations challenging a new law designed to restrict minors’ use of social media. The judge said the associations, whose members include Meta, Google, and YouTube, had not shown the law would apply to them.  He said they could refile the suit with evidence that it would.

Reddit will let users block ads for one year from advertisers they select.  There is a limit on how many they can block, although details are unclear.  Facebook and X already allow users to block or mute advertisers, so this is apparently a Trend.

Advertising platform Taboola, which already delivers ads on Microsoft properties such as MSN and Edge, will now also serve ads on Microsoft Outlook and other applications within the Microsoft 365 suite.  Don’t be alarmed: the ads only appear on free versions of the software.

Marketing Intelligence, a new solution from Salesforce, provides always-on ingestion of marketing data. Drawing on the unified data of Salesforce Data Cloud and the support of Agentforce agentic AI, it will deliver actionable insights and recommendations. It will feature a homepage for marketers; paid media optimization as Agentforce automatically pauses low-performing ads; and automatic data enrichment.

Among the product news from this week’s Adobe Summit is the new Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator to manage AI agents across Adobe and third parties through one interface. Among other things, agents can optimize websites and deal with repetitive content tasks as well as high volume data management. Adobe is also launching Brand Concierge, guiding consumers from discovery to purchase through conversational interactions.

Customer engagement platform Braze is partnering and integrating with Shopify to deliver personalized insights throughout the customer journey across Shopify-powered sites. New ecommerce capabilities will help brands take rapid action in response to pre-defined events like cart abandonment. Braze plans to roll out these capabilities to non-Shopify customers later in the year.