CDP Institute

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.

Did we know that social media companies collect our data and monetize it? Sure, but the FTC wants us to understand that this is happening on a vast scale (“surveillance practices can endanger people’s privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms,” said FTC Chair Lina Khan). Disappointingly, the report doesn’t break down information by platform, but noted indefinite retention of data with poor protection practices as well as use of the data to train AI.

In the era of AI, holding companies, agencies and consultancies are morphing into martech platforms. Global consultancy Credera is the latest, joining with Areteans (a leading Pega partner) to create the Connected Marketing Platform integrating data, analytics and decision-making. The three core capabilities are an analytics solution, data enrichment and a CDP powered by Tealium.

Communications firm Edelman has unveiled a new Counter Disinformation Unit within its crisis management offering, helping clients deal with mis- and disinformation. The launch coincides with the release of Edelman’s 2024 Connected Crisis Study which shows that AI outstrips the economy and climate change for business leaders. CMOs and CCOs are more chill about AI and more worried about the economy, social equity and the geopolitical situation.

We’re all about the dark side of AI today, Dear Reader.  Starting with the good news: nonprofit platform TrueMedia is offering the public a free version of its tool to identify deepfakes. The technology has been available to media organizations since May. Google is also planning a solution that flags photos which have been edited (for example, by Photoshop) or generated by AI.

Almost all consumers are concerned about disinformation impacting the elections (based on a survey of 2,000 by Adobe). Ninety-five percent went so far as to request attribution details attached to election content so that it can more readily be fact-checked. And 74% blame the government for not doing enough.

Back on the bright side, California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed legislation that will protect actors from the use of “digital impostors” without permission, even after their death. Estates will have the right to sue. The Motion Picture Association of America initially opposed the legislation as inimical to innovation, but took a neutral stance after amendments were incorporated.

RudderStack, which styles itself “the AI Data Cloud Native CDP”, has unveiled a suite of Data Apps running on its Customer 360 solution, which in turn runs within Snowflake AI Data Cloud. The apps support the fast delivery of data projects — for example, attribution data and propensity scores — from data teams to business stakeholders. They are now available to Enterprise Tier RudderStack customers on Snowflake.

HubSpot kicked off INBOUND 2024 with the announcement of a new AI offering, Breeze, designed to be an easy-to-use and complete AI solution. It includes an AI copilot, multiple AI agents to automate tasks and Breeze Intelligence to give a complete view of the customer. Copilot will be available across both browser and mobile versions of HubSpot.

According to a study published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, mentioning AI in a product description can trigger anxiety in consumers. Using a sample of around 300 consumers, the researchers found that using AI terminology to describe a new TV technology caused a reduction in intent to purchase. That reduction in intent was even more pronounced in the case of a car.