CDP Institute

We haven’t seen many Initial Public Offerings by martech companies recently, but customer engagement platform Klaviyo has just announced theirs.  Price has not been set.  Klaviyo also recently added a CDP module. Connect those dots as you will.

IPOs may be hard to find but venture funding still happens fairly often.  Latest deal is a first-time external raise of $20 million for Beamer, which helps companies manage product engagement by sending announcements to customers and collecting their feedback.  As product-led growth becomes more important, this sort of tech will creep closer to the center of the martech stack.

Times are even tougher for adtech than martech.  The bankruptcy of one-time leader MediaMath was especially jarring, not to mention painful for advertisers left holding $125 million in unpaid bills. MediaMath assets were just purchased for a fire-sale price of $22 million by video ad buying platform Infillion.

t was fun while it lasted, but the “how cool is that?” stage of generative AI adoption is now being replaced by the boring work of figuring which products are best for your purpose.  Arthur is making things a bit less painful with Arthur Bench, an open source tool to compare performance of large language model systems.  They’ve also published the first in a series of comparisons among popular products.

Made for Advertising (MFA) websites – auto-generated, low quality content that exists just to host advertising – have emerged as this summer’s favorite object of hand-wringing in some advertising circles.  If that’s what’s been keeping you up nights, you’ll be happy to hear that media buying agency GroupM is banning them from its inclusion lists, using Jounce Media’s MFA blacklist.  Now you can go back to worrying about shark attacks.

There are plenty of reports on the growth or shrinkage of different ad channels, but I don’t usually bother to share them with you, Dear Reader.  Still, news that summertime viewing of live broadcast TV fell 25% since last year seems shocking enough to mention.  Viewing will probably increase in the fall with the return of football and basketball, but it’s still a huge shift.

Twilio is kicking off its SIGNALS conference, which means we get a bouquet of product announcements.  Most relevant here is their hop onto the external data access bandwagon, with Zero Copy Architecture enabling direct access to data warehouse contents.  Other new features include generative AI-built customer journeys and support for new entities such as business accounts, subscriptions, and products.

I originally wasn’t going to mention YouTube’s announcement of a new framework to govern use of music with AI systems, jointly developed with Universal Music Group, because the principles themselves are so vague.  But this Verge piece  clarifies the importance: basically, Google is recognizing music owners’ rights while avoiding other constraints on how it scrapes data from the web.  It’s one more skirmish in the ongoing, and critically important, battle over how use of intellectual property will be compensated.

I’m still not sure whether I care that TikTok is adding paid search ads to its feed.  I mean, they sold ads already.  But it’s another crack in the wall of Google’s search ad garden, so maybe something to consider as evidence of the shifting landscape.