CDP Institute

Meta this week announced a round of performance-based layoffs likely affecting some 5% of its global staff. Zuckerberg is claiming to “raise the bar on performance management.” Meanwhile, employees are being encouraged to assist in the recruitment of machine learning engineers.

Marketing data and audience engagement platform Wiland is partnering with sports CDP StellarAlgo to enhance fan intelligence for sports organizations. Wiland’s FanSignals data on billions of fan transactions will be used by the StellarAlgo platform to enhance its fan profiles. The combination is aimed at enhancing fan loyalty, reducing churn and optimizing ticket and merchandise sales.

Retail media is the number one marketing channel for consumer goods brand, with 92% ranking it as their most important strategy according to a survey from Skai. Questions are raised, however, about ROI and incrementality. A full funnel approach to retail media is winning favor with 61% of leaders emphasizing its consistent messaging and 59% saying it helps to influence consumers throughout the customer journey. Only 25% claim full-funnel maturity, leaving room for growth.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked provisions of a Texas law that required users to verify their age and banned social media advertising targeted at teens. The judge had already blocked portions of the law limiting the content that teens could view.  All provisions were deemed likely violations of free speech.

Meanwhile, a Senate Committee has passed a bill which requires social media companies to estimate users’ ages and use their findings to block accounts for children under 13 and not use algorithms to recommend content for users under 17.  Prospects in the full Senate and House are uncertain but the bill does have bipartisan support.  The bill faces similar Constitution obstacles as the Texas law, but, then again, the Constitution ain’t what it used to be.

Meanwhile, Jamie from our Department of the Obvious, shares a pair of studies about GenAI. The first, from SEO agency HigherVisibility, finds that people use GenAI search for complex questions and conventional search for simple ones.  The second, from academics funded by Microsoft, finds that people with more trust in AI put less effort into checking its results and worries extensive AI use may result in the loss of skills needed to work without it.

Movable Ink has announced that its Da Vinci AI-driven personalization solution is now fully compatible with customer engagement platform Braze. Da Vinci’s content, personalized uniquely for each customer, can now be incorporated into Braze’s customer journey orchestration across email, push, SMS and WhatsApp. Movable Ink and Braze describe the initiative as an entrance to the “Omniverse,” which we hope does better than the Metaverse.

Lightning AI, the AI developer platform, has joined the growing AI marketplace space. Its AI Hub will be a marketplace for both AI models and applications and is launching with more than 50 APIs. As with regular app marketplaces, it’s thought likely that AI app marketplaces will speed the time to deployment.

More than 70% of consumers regard at least half of the online ads they see as untrustworthy according to a survey by GeoEdge. This seems prompted by a 10% increase YoY on “malvertising” practices, including auto-redirects and misleading product offers. Fifty-six percent of malvertising targeted mobile users.

They didn’t call it a CDP, but Meta just launched a product to “connect your first-party data from any sources to any destination, streamlining your data handling processes and unlocking valuable insights to optimize your marketing campaigns.” The name of this miracle cure is Signals Gateway, and pricing seems to start at $30 per month. Data is hosted in Amazon Web Services and, at least in theory, Meta can’t see it.

OpenAI has removed the sign-in requirement from ChatGPT searches, taking another step towards competing with Google for search advertising revenues. A Semrush analysis last November found that almost half of ChatGPT queries are already being answered using search, sending traffic to more than 30,000 unique domains. OpenAI still has some catching up to do: at the end of last year, ChatGPT had 566 million users compared with Google’s 6.5 billion.

DeepSeek’s cost-effective, open source gen AI has caused a lot of excitement, but the other shoe did not take long to drop. Cybersecurity experts say DeepSeek contains code that allows it to send user data direct to the Chinese government. You’d think that might provoke calls for it to be banned in the U.S.