Meta may be under fire by regulators and distrusted by consumers, but never forget that its core advertising business is a gold mine.  The company reported $29.65 billion revenue for the first quarter of 2023.  That’s up 3% from the pandemic-depressed Q1 last year, which isn’t great but better than the year-on-year declines in every quarter since.

If you need to be reminded what healthy growth looks like: Amazon reported a 21% year-on-year gain in Q1 retail media revenue, $9.5 billion.  Amazon accounts for 85% of the industry, according to eMarketer.  While some reports have predicted a slowdown in retail media, Skai takes a brighter view: 87% of advertisers plan to maintain or increase retail media spending this year.  Plot twist: funds for retail media most often come from the paid search budget, but are usually managed by ecommerce staff.

Salesforce kicked off its big Connections conference yesterday, and if you’re surprised the focus was on generative AI, you haven’t been paying attention.  Still, the focus this time was on marketing applications that draw on Salesforce CDP data, so it’s right up our alley.  They also announced direct access to Google BigQuery data, ticking the “zero-copy” box as well.