CDP Institute

This CDP survey from MessageGears contains more apples-to-oranges comparisons than the fruit bowl at your rich cousin’s wedding.  Case in point: it implicitly contrasts the 10% of CDP owners who feel their product meets all their needs with the 86% of composable tech (NOT composable CDP) users who are very or somewhat satisfied with it.  Still, the fundamental point—that no single product can meet all marketing department needs—is surely correct.

Digital experience platform Acquia has added AI capabilities to the digital asset management component of its suite, Acquia DAM. Acquia Video Creator is an AI-powered tool that allows easy creation of videos using drag-and-drop from the existing asset library. AI can generate voiceovers, subtitles and translations and there’s also automated transcription.

M&A initiatives in the martech space increased to 33 in Q3, 2024, an increase of 38% on Q2 according to stack management platform CabinetM. New product releases were down from Q1 and Q2, although those quarters saw a lot of AI-related announcements. Similarly, investment looks way down from over $10 billion in Q2 to $1.5 billion in Q3, but the Q2 figures were skewed by a couple of massive AI investments.

Continuing its steady product expansion, self-described “composable” CDP Hightouch has launched a solution to empower CTV advertisers. The solution will help target, match, and measure first-party audiences across the CTV landscape of DSPs, OEM platforms, and measurement tools. It supports programmatic and direct activation and enhances first-party audiences with third-party data licensed by Hightouch.

AI model builders now have one less excuse for not paying publishers to use their data: TollBit has launched a marketplace that makes it easy to license publisher content.  The system, which has already onboarded 200 publisher websites, also monitors for data collection bot traffic.  TollBit just raised a $24 million Series A, bringing total funding to $31 million.

Demand gen marketers are less than thrilled with their martech stacks: this Activate survey finds just 10% consider their stacks extremely effective, and 18% consider them somewhat or extremely ineffective.  The ineffective rate soars to 38% among marketers who did not meet 2023 demand gen goals.  Marketers who exceeded their 20023 goals also had better data: they were much more likely to provide sales teams with engagement history, lead scores, and behavioral data.

Salesforce makes a pitch for growing small businesses by launching an ecommerce storefront creation tool in its Starter and Pro Suites. The tool will be integrated with the sales, marketing, and support capabilities already in the suites. It will also be possible to manage products and pricing.

MACH Alliance, which maintains rigorous standards for composable systems, has just expanded its programs to help buyers separate truly composable products from composable pretenders. CDPs including Optimove, mParticle, and Twilio Segment all joined the MACH Alliance earlier this year.  CDPs Mapp and Bloomreach were already members.

The rollout of Chrome manifest version 3 sees Google officially disabling popular ad blockers like uBlock Origin. Google warned that this was on the roadmap back in June. Good news for advertisers, not so good for ad blocker businesses or indeed for users.

U.S. District Court Judge James Donato has stayed his own injunction ordering Google to host third-party apps in its Play store; this would have gone into force on November 1. The order also prohibited Google from forcing developers to use its own Play store billing system. The stay will remain in place pending the 9th Circuit’s ruling on Google’s request to lift the injunction.

Publicis Groupe-owned ad agency Team One has launched a new tool, Faikcheck, to detect AI deepfakes in images. Users upload media and Faikcheck issues a report on authenticity with a percentage confidence score. Team One is looking at extending this to video.

Good data access is the biggest difference between AI leaders (61%) and what are politely called “learners” (11%) in this IBM study.  Other factors typically considered important turn out to be more similar: use of custom AI vs. out-of-box scenarios (72% vs 33%), following a roadmap (85% vs 72%) and even revenue growth attributable to AI (67% vs 51%). Lots of good info here.