CDP Institute

Changes in marketing channels and data access have made advertising measurement more important, and challenging, than ever.  Taking advantage of growing interest in the topic, Bain Capital is selling Kantar Group’s audience measurement division, Kantar Media, to global investment firm H.I.G. Capital for “approximately $1 billion”.  Kantar Media accounts for 4,500  of Kantar Group’s 25,000 employees.

Jamie from our Department of the Obvious is thrilled at this Federal Trade Commission interim report which finds that “details like a person’s precise location or browser history can be frequently used to target individual consumers with different prices for the same goods and services.”  To quote the press release, “Staff found that consumer behaviors ranging from mouse movements on a webpage to the type of products that consumers leave unpurchased in an online shopping cart can be tracked and used by retailers to tailor consumer pricing.” Pearl clutching notwithstanding,... Read More >

Jamie also shares that the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating whether Google has a dominant position in search marketing.  They know the answer but need a formal finding to designate Google as having “strategic market status” under the UK’s new digital marketing competition regime.  This will empower the CMA to impose conduct requirements and pro-competition interventions.  In other words, the fun is just begun.

The second half of 2024 saw the CDP industry continue its shift towards embedding CDPs in customer-facing systems, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update report. Nearly all firms new to the report had added a CDP to an existing product, and major acquisitions including ActionIQ, Lytics, and mParticle were all made by customer management vendors. The new report adds coverage of composable CDP vendors, which is still a much smaller sector than conventional CDP systems.

TikTok went dark in the U.S. on Sunday, after the Supreme Court upheld a law forcing its owners to sell or shut it down, and then reappeared after incoming President Trump said he would save it.

While Google Gemini and OpenAI seem to be seeking entry to the AI-generated newsfeed space, Apple is temporarily pulling its widely criticized AI newsfeed. News organizations, notably the BBC, had complained about it distorting their content. One recent “scoop” said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested.

CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million.  It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge.  (See this blog post for more analysis.)

Meta and X seem determined to confuse their members by flooding their feeds with falsehoods. Google is taking the opposite tack with an agreement to use Associated Press information in real-time Gemini AI search results.  Google hasn’t always been enthusiastic about paying to use news content but apparently they’ve decided that providing some level of reliable information is important.

OpenAI is also cozying up to the news space, funding four new Axios newsrooms as part of a deal that could lead to as many as 100 locations. As part of the arrangement, OpenAI will draw on Axios content to answer user queries. OpenAI will also help Axios develop technologies to support journalists.

Google’s search market share has dropped below 90% for the first time since 2015 according to web traffic analysis platform Statcounter. This does not necessarily signal a migration of users to AI search, since Statcounter compares search traffic only among the main search engines.  The likes of Bing and Yandex are still way behind Google.

That doesn’t mean the AI chatbots aren’t commanding greater dominance, especially in the U.S. ChatGPT achieved 45% of the U.S. market share in Q4 2024, while competitors are performing well in emerging markets. Google Gemini now has over 50% of India’s download market.

Media networks continue to grow beyond retail with LiveRamp and casino resort chain Mohegan Sun launching the first casino media network. Mohegan’s first party data will allow brands to reach guests and players and measure campaigns across the casino’s digital channels and many on-premise experiences, including slot machines and kiosks. LiveRamp’s role is unifying data across sources, creating connected customer views.