CDP Institute

Mastercard has unveiled Mastercard Commerce Media, its new digital media network that can attribute conversion to in-store and online purchases. The network features a 25,000-advertiser base and reach to 500 million enrolled customers. A “growing collaboration” with WPP allows connection to traditional media.

Spotify’s audio and video inventory is now available to advertisers on Amazon’s DSP, as well as an integration with Yahoo DSP. A partnership with ID5 also allows more effective programmatic advertising in Europe. And a new Split Testing tool will allow advertisers to run controlled experiments on creative elements.

Performance marketing suite TNC Engine is now available on Google Cloud Marketplace. The integration allows for faster solution adoption and activation. It adds one more option for users to build composable CDP systems on a Google Cloud foundation.

CDP Zeta Global has just agreed to acquire Marigold, planning to complement its Retain use cases with Acquire and Grow use cases. Marigold includes various martech businesses serving more than 100 enterprise brands globally. Price is up to $325 million.

Customer engagement platform Braze has announced BrazeAI Decisioning Studio, which uses reinforcement learning to experiment and adapt based on consumer behavior. This allows optimization of the most important KPIs. They also announced Agent Console (beta), which will allow users to create and deploy AI agents throughout the platform.

OpenAI’s new Sora app creates videos entirely via AI. Most people consider this idea questionable or flat-out terrible. Meta introduced a similar AI slop feed last week, which was widely detested.

Let’s catch up today on news that went unmentioned while we obsessed about TikTok, Google, Microsoft, and the rest. First, some CX acquisitions: Stockholm-based experience analytics vendor Netigate bought Netherlands-based digital feedback collector Mopinion while Colorado-based survey platform Alchemer bought San Diego-based review and comment collector Chatmeter. We also have “AI-native operating system for advertising” Veylan buying media sales platform Advisr and, far from least, investment firm Thoma Bravo spending $1.4 billion to buy SaaS pricing and sales solution PROS Holdings, Inc.

Next, let’s follow some money. Biggest spend is $165 million invested by Battery Ventures in risk and reputation intelligence platform Signal AI; some sources consider this a buy-out. We also have $30 million invested in Structured (formerly StructuredWeb) for channel-partner marketing automation. And let’s not forget vibe coding start-up Emergent announcing a $23 million Series A to let “everyday entrepreneurs” build their own apps.

Of course, there’s an endless swarm of AI product announcements. Among familiar names, Pega has launched the “industry’s first agentic enterprise transformation platform”; Klaviyo has added Marketing and Customer Agents to its “AI-first B2C CRM”; and Invoca has a new AI solution to connect TV and video ads to revenue. Less-familiar Easify offers what it calls the “first all-in-one AI-powered marketing platform”, which is actually limited to outbound messages. Perhaps most novel, Novi attaches verified trust signals such as badges, certifications and endorsements to ecommerce products, raising their visibility with... Read More >