We’ll cover a broad range of topics today. First is this Demand Spring report on B2B revenue marketing, which includes two particularly intriguing factoids: just 17% of users report more than six tools in their tech stack (seems low), and Hubspot has overtaken Marketo as the most popular marketing automation system (36% vs 25%) (very plausible).
This according to researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, who found the technology enabled them to pick out a single person from 50,000 others with more than 94% accuracy. Impressive, and quite alarming!
Let’s switch to retail media networks. This Integral Ad Science report does a slick job of leading the reader toward their desired conclusion, which is that contextual ads are the best use for retail media dollars. That’s not how I’d naturally read the report, which finds that buyers pay the most attention to ads for products that are on sale (51%). It also makes no mention of leveraging first party data, except to note that advertisers list it as the most important retail media opportunity.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.