CDP Institute

Google parent Alphabet is said to be considering making an offer to acquire HubSpot. Anonymous sources told Reuters that Alphabet has met with Morgan Stanley advisers to discuss the possibility. HubSpot’s current market valuation is $32 billion.

Amazon is set to abandon its experiment with checkout-free grocery stores. Apparently automated, the process actually required more than 1,000 remote “cashiers” in India to monitor video of checkouts. This was followed by reports that AWS plans to eliminate hundreds of positions both in its physical stores and across its sales, marketing and global services divisions.

Retail media buyers can now target ads based on banking transactions of 80 million Chase Bank customers. Nothing creepy about that. The launch of Chase Media Solutions follows Chase’s 2022 acquisition and integration of Figg, the card-linked marketing platform.

Who says martech funding is dead?  Social reviews and commerce platform Flip just raised an impressive $144 million Series C, bringing total funding to $238.8 million.  Flip will also adapt AXON ad targeting technology from AppLovin, which provided $50 million of the new round.

Tech giants like Meta and Google may be increasingly skittish about news publishing, but spunky little Yahoo (a phrase we never thought we’d see) is jumping into the fray with the acquisition of news curation platform Artifact. The personalized news feeds adjust to users’ interests over time. As part of Yahoo, Artifact will deliver curated news to millions of users globally.

Are marketers paying too much attention to technology?  Well, they did tell Survey Monkey that “access to tools and resources” ranks as their top important success factor (44%), ahead of data and insights (43%), culture (41%) decision-making autonomy (39%), efficiency (39%) and stakeholder buy-in (33%). “Changes in tools and software” rose from fifth place to second in their list of challenges (49%), nearly tied with increasing performance expectations (50%) and strategy changes (48%). Still, their top goal was more personalized marketing (55%)..

Reltio, the data management and unification vendor, has unveiled a Customer 360 Data Product, intended to be the first in a series of Customer 360 releases. The cloud-based solution aims to offer a comprehensive, near real-time view of customer data. The solution is geared to tackle operational use cases as well as enhance customer experiences.

Cadent, the converged TV advertising solutions provider, has announced its intention to acquire AdTheorent. AdTheorent uses machine learning to identify and deliver impactful campaigns to the most qualified audiences. In combination, Cadent and AdTheorent expect to offer expanded performance ad solutions for digital and traditional TV.

Google is set to destroy billions of data records of millions of Chrome users in settlement of a class action lawsuit filed in 2020. Despite the message “You’ve gone Incognito,” Google continued to scrape data from Incognito searches. It used this data to measure web traffic and sell ad inventory.

Dentsu’s Merkury for Media is a new, first-party data driven media offering within its Merkury platform. It will support addressable media experiences as well as AI-powered media allocation and optimization. It features an audience builder using first-party data enriched with data from anonymized Merkury IDs as well as a media planner and cookieless digital activation.

The United States may not lead the world in health (we’re 34th), happiness (23rd), or per capital GDP (eighth), but when it comes to advertising, we’re still Number One.   In fact, Dentsu estimates that U.S. ad spend will reach $940 per person in 2024, far ahead of second place United Kingdom (a mere $643) and almost seven times the global average of $139.  How great is that?

Seventy-six percent of high-growth B2B and B2C startups have designated AI teams with moderate-growth startups close behind (72%). Startups are adopting AI across a wide range of processes, from internal emails to product development, go-to-market, operations and customer service. HubSpot for Startups interviewed over 1,000 early stage startup founders.