CDP Institute

Channel partner marketing software serves brands that sell through independent dealers or franchisees. As you might imagine, it requires specialized features and is sold by relatively few vendors.  The list just got smaller: partner marketing vendor Ansira has acquired competitors BrandMuscle and SproutLoud and plans to fold their teams and technology into its current offering.

Meta has opened a new AI studio where anyone can build custom chatbots or “AI characters.” The chatbots can be deployed on social media platforms such as Instagram to answer common DM questions or respond to story replies. They can also be used by businesses to respond to social media messages faster.

Twenty-three percent of global programmatic mobile app ad spend was lost to invalid traffic in Q1 2024, including ad fraud, according to a new trends report from Pixalate. That represents $1.4 billion of the estimated $6.2 billion total spend. North America accounted for over half of that total spend.

Google lost a massive antitrust case on Monday when a federal judge ruled it has violated antitrust law to maintain a monopoly for its search business.  The opinion focused on deals such as its $20 billion payment to Apple to be the default search engine on the iPhone. Google will surely appeal.  Penalties will be determined in a separate proceeding, with the potential to restructure major portions of the internet economy.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has issued policy recommendations supporting open source work in the generative AI space. The availability of open source models, like the latest iteration of Meta’s Llama, allows developers to build independently on previous work, speeding innovation. The NTIA also speaks of minimizing risks of bad actors taking advantage of open source systems.

Up to 85% of visitors to retail websites go unidentified, according to a new report from retail marketing platform Bluecore. Identifying and engaging with visitors consistently leads to higher repeat purchase rates. There were also reactivation rates as low as 10% across the board — and reactivated customers spend more than new ones.

Data activation and reverse ETL platform Census is launching Universal Data Platform, which provides data governance, transformation and activation functions to create CDP-style customer profiles in a cloud data warehouse.  Features are designed for use by both business and technical users. Census’ blog post notes that “composable CDPs” have focused only on activation, but doesn’t mention that some “composable” vendors now offer more.

Roku already sits on first-party data from 83.6 million streaming households. It will now enrich its targeting capabilities by drawing on data in Unified ID 2.0, originally developed by the Trade Desk. The combination is intended to support more personalized and precise ad targeting.

Experian’s new solution for retail media networks will help them understand their customers beyond purchase category or history. RMNs will have access to Experian’s vast identity graph as well as detailed customer profile reports. A lot of people are betting on RMNs right now.

Healthcare CDP WebMD Ignite is launching two new solutions designed to support healthcare provider growth. Ignite Provider Suite Analytics Module is a data and analytics platform designed to help marketing and BI teams to develop strategic referral growth initiatives. Referral Growth Targeting will help healthcare organizations target the right provider at the right time to improve referral volume.

Adtech platform Innovid has announced the launch of Harmony Frequency, the first holistic frequency management solution for CTV and digital advertising. “Frequency”, if my Mom is reading this, is how often the same person sees the same ad; inability to control it is a big problem for advertisements that run across multiple platforms.  The new solution will let advertisers control it across their entire addressable media portfolio, so long as all their ads are purchased through Innovid.

The average cost of a data breach is now $4.88 million dollars, up 10% from $4.45 million last year, according to IBM. The good news that that extensive use of AI across prevention workflows resulted in an average of $2.2 million less in breach costs. AI has yet to obscure the challenge of a serious human cyber skills shortage.