Mastercard is buying SessionM, which combines a CDP with a loyalty system. It extends Mastercard’s growing suite of data-driven marketing services for retailers and other brands. The deal joins Treasure Data/Arm, Lattice Engines/Dun & Bradstreet, Mintigo/Anaplan, Radius Intelligence/Kabbage, and Allsight/Informatica as examples of a CDP purchased by a company outside the usual set of martech suppliers.

And you know those sophisticated marketing technologies you’ve been struggling to deploy, including cross-device campaigns, chatbot access to shopping behavior and customer service interactions, and social media ads based on visits to other sites? Accenture Interactive found consumers consider them four of the five creepiest things you can do. The only thing that’s creepier is receiving an ad for something you only talked about near a voice assistant.

Unauthorized training data isn’t an existential threat to generative AI but it’s certainly a headache for users and developers alike.  Most developers are trying to exclude materials that creators have explicitly labeled as unauthorized and citing “fair use” as justification for copying everything else.  Getty Images has taken an opposite approach, building its gen AI tool only on materials that are explicitly licensed.  It’s possible that tracing the provenance of training data will become a standard, similar to how organic food producers trace the origins of their ingredients.