CDP Institute

Reports emerged at the weekend that Salesforce was in advanced talks to acquire data management and integration platform Informatica.  The deal would be Salesforce’s largest since acquiring Slack in 2021, and shares fell 7% Monday on the news.  Informatica would add more advanced technical capabilities to the Salesforce product line.

Despite Adobe repeatedly stating that AI image generator Firefly was not trained on images scraped from the web, a report by Bloomberg states that some of the training data included AI-generated images from competitors like Midjourney. Adobe has said a relatively small amount of images from competitors — around 5% — was used. Given the amount of training data that must have been used, 5% is still a lot of images; and Adobe has millions of image assets of its own.

The California Journalism Preservation Act (not yet in force) will require digital platforms to pay a “journalism usage fee” for linking to news stories. Google’s response: remove links to California news websites. Facebook has taken similar measures in several countries and a new report suggests that the result is memes taking over from hard news.

Incrmntal has released its Explorer platform, which uses “causal AI” to estimate the incremental impact of advertising investments.  What’s magic is the incremental measurements happen without marketers needing to set up incremental impact tests.  The system can also suggest the best place to spend your next ad dollar.

DoubleVerify will support TikTok’s new Inventory Filters – Vertical Sensitivity and Category Exclusion — providing brand safety and suitability measurement across 16 new categories of potentially sensitive content. The media effectiveness platform aims to ensure promotions are aligned with suitable content on the platform. This follows DoubleVerify’s January move to support Facebook Feed and Instagram Reels.

Bloomberg reports that the ad cost per impression on Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram has doubled or tripled in recent weeks.  Meta said: “Our ads system is working as expected for the vast majority of advertisers.”  Both statements could be true.

Discounts are becoming ever more important in the digital commerce space and Amazon has responded by enabling the creation of percentage or flat-rate discount coupons for tailored audiences. Brands will be able to target repeat customers, high-spend customers, recent customers or cart-abandoners. Additional audiences, such as promising customers and at-risk customers will be available in the U.S. only.

Google has been reminding users that it will turn off all Universal Analytics services and APIs on July 1, 2024. Data not retrieved before that date will be deleted and not recoverable. Consider it a none-too-subtle reminder of how central Google is to the internet ecosystem.

Netflix will boast one-fifth of U.S. OTT subscriptions this year, more than any other service, according to eMarketer’s Q1 digital video forecast. OTT subscription revenues will exceed those of traditional pay TV for the first time in 2025; the cable is finally being cut.  Nevertheless, the rate at which subscriptions to pay TV and OTT combined is growing has slowed since 2023 and is likely to continue slowing through 2027.

With the Google Cloud Next conference in full swing, cloud data management platform Informatica has launched a Master Data Management Extension for BigQuery to support rapid onboarding of master data. This should enable rapid deployment of CDPs and generative AI solutions on Google Cloud. Ad agency group WPP will integrate Google Gemini (formerly Bard) with WPP Open, its AI-powered marketing operating system.

Snap and Snowflake are experimenting with an integration between Snap’s conversion APIs and Snowflake’s Marketing Data Cloud. Once the integration is rolled out, marketers will be able securely to share data like targeting and conversions, without building a custom back-end integration. Alongside the Google Cloud news, this is further evidence that data clouds are taking a more central role in the marketing technology space.

Hootsuite is looking to evolve from social media management to social media performance and the acquisition of social listening platform Talkwalker is intended to support that mission. Social listening has been around for years; Hootsuite’s plan is to apply Talkwalker AI to elevate listening to the generation of actionable insights and impact measurement. Together, Hootsuite and Talkwalker expect to offer reach across 100+ social networks and 150 million websites.