Welcome to “Trends Nobody Else Cares About Day” at CDP Institute. We’ll start with Gap Inc.’s acquisition of virtual fitting room app Drapr, which lets consumers try on clothes remotely. This one’s a two-fer: it illustrates the trend for retailers to buy tech companies rather than just using their products, and the trend of virtual dressing rooms, following Walmart’s purchase of Zeekit in May. Woot!
A bit ambiguous: Moloco reports that mobile acquisition costs have grown by more than 200% for tracked users and 155% for non-tracked users since Apple introduced its enhanced privacy controls in iOS 14.5 in April. That’s bad news for advertisers but good news for consumers whose privacy preferences are being respected. Two thirds of ad bids (67.5%) now come from users who have opted out of tracking.
Next up: Point Pickup Technologies has purchased white label ecommerce platform GrocerKey. This highlights the trend of retailers taking control over last-mile delivery systems, rather than relying on United Parcel Service, Amazon, Uber, Instacart, or others. You’ll recall that WalMart opened its own delivery services to other retailers just last week.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.