CDP Institute

Incoming FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson has canceled the agency’s request for comments on its preliminary report on surveillance pricing. Surveillance pricing is the practice of secretly tracking consumer behavior to determine what price to charge for a product or service. In comments, Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya seemed to imply that this is only of several topics where opportunities to comment have been removed.

Optable, the identity management and collaboration platform for the ad eco-system, has raised $20 million in a Series A Acceleration round. Optable provides identity management and clean room solutions to help media companies enrich and activate audience data securely. Its media clients include Hearst and The Globe & Mail.

Email creation platform Stensul and dynamic personalization platform Movable Ink have deepened their existing integration in order to speed the email creation process. Movable Ink Studio automatically transforms data into personalized content. The enhanced integration includes previews of Movable Ink content for each individual subscriber within Stensul and simpler testing and review workflows.

2024 saw a 9.3% YoY increase in average SaaS spending, the first jump in three years, according to a new report from Zylo. The reason seems simply to be that vendor prices have gone up. In order to maintain revenue, vendors are offering premium add-ons, AI features, as well as shifting to new pricing models, especially consumption-based pricing.

Behavior-based personalization has started out-performing journey-based personalization in emails, and both do better than broadcast emails. That’s according to an analysis of over 17 billion emails by MoEngage. Broadcast (mass) emails are performing worse on most metrics YoY.

Looking back at 2024 and at the trends shaping 2025, Winterberry Group sees CTV taking center stage with spending approaching parity with linear TV. One main factor is the arrival of sports coverage in the CTV space. It also sees the creator economy moving beyond mere influence to measurable impact.

The Media Rating Council has concluded the accreditation process for Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel National TV measurement. The measurement pairs what Nielsen calls a “high quality, representative panel” with data pulled from devices in some 45 million homes. The measurement was widely adopted by broadcasters and agencies for the 2024 upfront season.

IAB’s 2025 Outlook forecasts that ad spend will grow for all digital channels this year, led by double digit growth for CTV, social and retail media. Conversely, spend on linear TV, in the absence of cyclical events like the soccer World Cup or the Olympics, is set to decrease sharply YoY. Eighty percent of buyers will be using or considering gen AI tools for media planning and activation.

Sixty-three percent of marketers surveyed by Mediaocean picked gen AI as the consumer trend to watch in 2025. CTV and social video came a close second and third with 56% and 51% respectively. Unsurprisingly, the Mediaocean survey concurred with IAB Outlook that marketers will prioritize digital channels this year.

The Trade Desk has announced a definitive agreement to acquire digital advertising data company Sincera. Sincera helps advertisers evaluate the quality of data provided by publishers and thus more accurately assess the value of ad impressions. With the integration, The Trade Desk will also be able to show publishers the data signals most valued by advertisers.

Meta has enthusiastically ditched U.S. fact-checking in favor of right-wing-friendly “community notes”.  But a spokesperson said on Monday that it will keep fact checkers active outside of the U.S., possibly because European regulators are more opposed to misinformation than the current U.S. regime. On the other hand, Google has told the European Commission that it will pull out of existing voluntary fact-checking commitments before these become legally required.

A notable 72% of marketers plan to increase their programmatic budget in 2025, while 46% plan on shifting budget from linear to CTV. The data comes from a survey of advertisers, publishers, and technology companies by Proximic from Comscore. With cookies teetering on the brink, interest in contextual data remains strong with 54% planning to increase its use this year.