The CDP industry had a good first half, with existing vendors growing a solid 10% and eleven new vendors, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update.  But investment activity was down, with just one big deal ($175 million for Bloomreach) and one acquisition (BlueConic sold a majority stake to Vista Equity Partners).  Lots more here, of course.

Influencer marketing occupies an untamed corner of the media jungle, although plenty of companies have tried to civilize it.  The Association of National Advertisers is helping with a set of guidelines for measuring influencer marketing results.  The guidelines offer definitions for different awareness, engagement, and conversion metrics plus a handy chart of how different social platforms do their calculations.

Marketing Intelligence, a new solution from Salesforce, provides always-on ingestion of marketing data. Drawing on the unified data of Salesforce Data Cloud and the support of Agentforce agentic AI, it will deliver actionable insights and recommendations. It will feature a homepage for marketers; paid media optimization as Agentforce automatically pauses low-performing ads; and automatic data enrichment.