Nearly three-quarters (72%) of CMOs surveyed by London Research for Relay42 said the loss of third-party cookies is a major challenge for their business. No leading alternative has emerged, but CDP users are seven times more likely (30% vs 4%) to feel they’ll do well in the brave new world. In fact, CDP users do better at pretty much everything.
Google continues to refine Topics API, its privacy-protecting ad targeting scheme for the post-third-party-cookie world. The latest changes add some 280 commercially-focused categories, let advertisers learn a little more about the topics a person has consumed, improve speed, and let people block selected topics in advance. You’ll note the trend here is to give more information to advertisers, which is another way of saying less privacy to everyone else.
You may recall that Meta is dead set against paying publishers whose links appear on its site. Coincidentally or not, the traffic from Facebook to such links has fallen by half in the past year, according to data from Echobox. It seems Meta is showing users more videos instead. All fine, but Reuters Institute reports that more people get news from social media than news sites and Facebook is still the most common social media news source, although its share is rapidly falling.
Here’s a new buzzword for your Bingo card: “agentic AI”, which describes systems that act by themselves rather than in response to a prompt. Salesforce was all over the concept last week, announcing its Agentforce collection. According to the company, it replaces the “now-outdated copilots and chatbots” with agents “operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans without requiring human intervention.”