CDP Institute

Google has been sued by a multinational roster of 32 European publishers and media businesses claiming damages of 2.3 billion euros.They claim that Google’s market dominance reduced the value of their ad inventory and made adtech services more expensive. Google’s possible abuse of its market position is already under investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority in the U.K.

Interpublic Group (IPG), the ad agency and media holding company, has launched IPG Engine, a platform that leverages Adobe GenStudio for AI-driven content creation, production and activation. Adobe capabilities available in GenStudio include Adobe Workfront, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Express and Adobe Firefly. The Engine will leverage IPG-owned Acxiom’s data and identity tools to support its profiling and audience creation capabilities.

Although 70% of consumers are mobile gamers, 21% of mobile gamers aren’t reached by social ads. With 150 million mobile gamers in the U.S., that 21% represents a large potential audience. Games represent 10.6% of all mobile time spent but only 3.9% of total ad spend, leaving big opportunities, according to a report by mobile ad agency Digital Turbine in collaboration with app intelligence firm Apptopia.

TransUnion’s marketing arm TruAudience is partnering with data clean room vendor Samooha, which was purchased last year by Snowflake.  Users will be able to access TransUnion’s marketing identity graph natively within Samooha and securely collaborate in sharing customer data without compromising privacy.

Most CDPs are focused on marketing, but the category also includes customer success platforms like Totango.  Speaking of Totango, they just merged with Catalyst, a customer growth platform.  The goal is a complete view of customer health as well as account, cross-sell and upsell management.

In-game shopping – cleverly called “gcommerce” – is an intriguing alternative to advertising within walled gardens or on the open Web.  SCUTI offers a rewarded shopping marketplace integrated with 120 games reaching around 50 million monthly users.  They just announced a $10 million in Series A funding, bringing total funding to $17 million.

Blueshift has announced a new Audience Insights module using real-time analytics to source insights into customer behavior without leaning on engineering and analytics teams. The module features an interface for data visualization. Blueshift also announced additional data warehouse syncs with Databricks, to be followed by Google BigQuery.

Trust in ecommerce platforms lags behind social media marketplaces, brick and mortar stores and branded digital storefronts according to a new survey of 500 adult consumers. It can’t help that 42% frequently receive damaged goods and even more report financial fraud, delivery delays and payment glitches. E-sellers are frustrated by back-end processing and fulfillment delays.

In an extensive survey of global digital demographics, media intelligence firm Meltwater reports that almost 98% of internet users (aged 16 to 64) have some kind of mobile phone (mostly smartphones) while almost 60% have some kind of PC or laptop. There’s growth in ownership YoY, but it’s single digits or less, arguably suggesting that the use of these devices has reached saturation point. 5.35 billion out of the global population of 8.08 billion are using the internet.

Consumer perception prediction platform Curated for You has unveiled a new Purchase Intent Email and SMS Trigger platform. Email and SMS triggers have traditionally been based on past consumer behavior such as cart abandonment. The new platform anticipates future needs based on recent behavior as well as demographic and location data. It seeks to trigger actions based on understanding motivation for behavior rather than just, for example, purchased product attributes.

Technology review site TrustRadius has identified AI-written software reviews as a new threat to authenticity and quality, saying that using AI to generate content represented as the user’s own could lead to “legal repercussions.” The future lies in video reviews, it says in its 2024 Review Transparency Report. These can be captured at vendor events, reducing time investment on the part of the reviewer.

Lack of trained employees is a problem for marketing organizations at all levels.  One issue may be that employees prefer face-to-face training (cited by 69% in this iSpring study), while course creators prefer to build online courses (cited by 77%).   Most companies create their training content in-house, although externally-sourced content is more popular in consumer industries including media, automotive, retail, and financial services.