CDP Institute

Data activation and engagement platform MessageGears is adding tools to ingest data and build profiles in cloud data warehouses.  It’s a major expansion for MessageGears, which previously offered only tools to activate existing warehouse data.  The change makes MessageGears more comparable to other “warehouse-native” CDPs, which also offer a combination of profile building and data activation.

Escalating its spat with hosting platform WP Engine, open source CMS developer WordPress.org has blocked WP Engine from accessing its resources.  The result is that WP Engine users will find it hard or impossible to install plugins, themes, and security patches. When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.

While a search for better features drives the replacement of applications in the martech stack, the choice of replacement is constrained by cost. That’s the headline from the annual MarTech Replacement Survey from martech.org. Nearly one-quarter (23%) of those surveyed said they replaced their commercial application (usually with a different commercial application) to reduce expenses.

GrowthLoop, which calls itself a “composable CDP,” is offering a new marketing measurement solution that uses whatever data your company has available in cloud databases including Amazon Redshift, Databricks, Google Big Query and Snowflake. Called The Loop, the AI-based solution estimates the impact of marketing channels, audiences and campaigns and makes recommendations.

Popular social media platform TikTok has thrown its hat into the Google-dominated search ad ring with its new Search Ads Campaign solution. This will enable keyword-based advertising on TikTok’s search results page and reflects the industry’s growing interest in social-based search. The launch comes as TikTok challenges a U.S. ban set for next year.

If social search is growing in importance, so too is social shopping.  A new report from Horizon Media finds one in four people are using social shopping with 80% saying they make purchases twice a month. Gen Z (75%) and Millennials (76%) are open to social shopping, while Gen X (61%) is not exactly adverse.

Salesforce yesterday announced an agreement to buy unstructured data management vendor Zoomin for an undisclosed amount.  The technology will expand the capabilities of the Data Cloud CDP, especially to support AI agents.  It’s Salesforce’s third acquisition this month.

Zeta Global is integrating Yahoo ConnectID, Yahoo’s cookieless, cross-channel customer identifier, into Zeta Data Cloud, and adding the Yahoo DSP into the Zeta Marketing Platform. The changes will expand audience targeting capabilities for both vendors.  Yahoo will also migrate its member database and email marketing automation to Zeta.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill that required web and mobile browsers to offer universal opt-out from data sharing.  California law requires Internet companies to honor such requests but major browsers do not currently provide a mechanism to make them. The bill was supported by privacy advocates and passed the state legislature by large margins, but faced intense industry opposition.

An overwhelming 90% of marketers are now using generative AI tools at least once a month with 70% using them weekly, according to a survey of 141 marketing and advertising professionals by Basis Technologies. ChatGPT is most widely used in advertising (83%) while ChatGPT Plus is the most popular among paid models. Sixty-seven percent use the tools for content creation although a slightly higher number (70%) say it’s not as good as human-generated content.

One third of the 200 senior marketing executives surveyed by the CMO Council in partnership with Zeta Global say campaign performance needs to improve or has underperformed. They are still struggling to identify strategies that positively impact ROI. In good news, more than half said they had met revenue and customer acquisition goals last year (but B2C outperformed B2B on those counts).

The first half of this year saw a very slight uptick in digital commerce M&A activity compared with the second half of 2023. The rise is slight, from 1,063 deals to 1,089 but is said to reflect a recovery from the post-pandemic trend. Median revenue multiple in the space declined for the second consecutive six-month period.