CDP Institute

It’s no news that Amazon captures detailed information about its customers’ browsing, purchasing, and streaming histories.  So it’s not particularly surprising that they’ve just unveiled Ad Relevance, which uses that data to target advertising across tools including Amazon Audiences, Contextual Targeting, and Performance+.  Amazon stresses the obvious fact that this works without relying on third-party cookies or identity solutions, maybe because that’s what ad buyers want to hear.

Streaming video companies don’t have the purchase data of an Amazon, so they often collaborate with retail data compilers to help advertisers target and measure results. Disney has hopped on that bandwagon by integrating data from Affinity Solutions, which brings a proprietary audience graph and transactions on some 140 million debit and credit cards.

It’s open season on TikTok.  Their latest tormentor is the Federal Trade Commission, which has referred a complaint against TikTok and its owner ByteDance to the Department of Justice for violating, or being about to violate, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The FTC doesn’t usually announce such referrals but they made an exception because, well, it’s TikTok.

The U.S. Department of Justice has commenced a lawsuit against Adobe accusing it of making it hard to cancel subscriptions to Photoshop and other software. In particular, it is alleged that it concealed an expensive cancellation fee from consumers and that its customer service reps made canceling difficult. This follows a lawsuit last year in which the FTC accused Amazon of making it hard to cancel Prime membership.

CDP Amperity is launching media measurement tools to help brands evaluate the impact of digital advertising on sales. It will directly integrate with ad platforms like The Trade Desk, Meta and TikTok, allowing brands to connect online and offline transactions to digital advertising in one platform. An expanded integration with Universal ID 2.0 will connect first-party data with privacy-safe identifiers to track advertising touchpoints across the web.

Almost 90% of company directors (and above) believe that AI will offer them a competitive advantage, according to a survey of more than 500 business leaders by CDP Twilio Segment. Most also believe that AI will cause a shift from reactive to predictive personalization. More than 80% also support the embedding of emotional intelligence in AI solutions that interact with customers.

Instacart will extend its first-party retail media data to YouTube powering instant shoppable experiences for its advertisers. Shoppable video campaigns from partners like Clorox and Publicis will leverage Instacart data to target high intent consumers. Viewers will be able to click directly from the videos to an Instacart product page.

Google Ad Manager will serve programmatic and reserved ads as part of email newsletter inventory (it’s in beta). This will be an additional revenue source for newsletters that had previously only sold direct buy ad placements. Also, of course, it doesn’t rely on cookies.

Advertising on websites known for misinformation is pervasive across companies in a range of industries, a new study by Nature finds. Taking a sample of around 5,500 such websites, the study found over 40,000 companies engaged in advertising on them with well over nine million instances of ads. A survey of decision-makers showed them largely unaware of their brands advertising on such websites, with 62% saying they were “surprised.”

Self-described composable CDP GrowthLoop is making its AI-powered audience generation available as a native app on Snowflake Data Cloud. This means marketers will be able to use the solution without their data leaving Snowflake. Having the audience generator running alongside the data should increase campaign launch velocity.

A new partnership between Oracle and Shopify will see Oracle Unity CDP integrated with Shopify’s commerce platform. Joint Oracle and Shopify customers will be able to create more personalized commerce experiences using Unity data. The integration will also support AI-powered recommendations and offers.

In two stories on a collision course, the Trustworthy Accountability Group has restored the brand safety certification that it tore from X, the platform previously known as Twitter, back in March. Apple, IBM and other companies had suspended advertising after their content appeared in proximity to pro-Nazi posts. Meanwhile, Pew Research has identified X as having the highest rate of inaccurate reporting as gauged by users (86% have seen false news; 37% see it regularly).