Meta also has a big “trust me” sticker attached to its latest offering, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. Similar to Google’s Performance Max, the service asks marketers to share customer lists, ad materials, campaign targets, and a budget, and then let Meta decide what ads to buy and offers to show. Like Google, Meta will tell advertisers how well it did rather than giving them data to judge for themselves.
‘Tis the season for advice from companies you don’t trust. Having created immense uncertainty with its ever-changing schedule for third-party cookie deprecation and rotating cast of privacy-safe(ish) targeting alternatives, Google has set out its latest version of the path forward. It mostly comes down to letting Google target for you and grade its own results.
TikTok is offering more modest help, in the form of a report on marketing trends for 2023. It’s exceptionally well organized, but the trust barrier is high: the federal government is poised to ban TikTok on government computers and a recent study found TikTok pushes self-harm and suicide videos to vulnerable youths within minutes of registration.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)