CDP Institute

A U.S. district court judge has ruled that Google acted to create illegal monopolies in online advertising technology in a way that blocked competition and allowed higher ad prices to be charged. Google will appeal; meantime, the government will decide what to ask the court to do to remedy the monopoly. Google also faces a new U.K. antitrust lawsuit over its dominance of search.

HubSpot will acquire omni-search AI tool Dashworks to accelerate the responsiveness of marketing, sales and service AI assistants to internal business queries. Dashworks responds to internal natural language questions by scouring business information, from CRM to apps, emails, documents, tickets and meeting notes. Dashworks will combine with HubSpot’s existing Breeze Copilot feature.

Adobe Real-Time CDP is integrating Roku’s connected TV viewer data to support real time audience planning, custom audience activation, and campaign measurement. The deal leverages recently-launched Roku Data Cloud, an expanded data clean room that makes Roku data more readily available to marketers. It’s part of a larger trend to enable individual-level targeting of CTV ads.

Remember the good old days, when lying was considered unacceptable? The folks at Iron Tribe Fitness, a South Carolina gym, are holding Meta to that forgotten standard in a class action suit alleging that Facebook overcharged advertisers as much as $4 billion by using one type of auction bidding process while claiming to use another.  Meta blames the error on a “software glitch” that began in 2013 and continued for at least four years.

Here’s something else that once seemed worth spending time on: the debate between multi-purpose software suites and best of breed point solutions.  This Braze survey of 2,300 marketing leaders reports that 50% of brands use a unified platform for cross-channel engagement while 32% rely on disconnected systems for each channel.  Scoring another point for Team Suite, Braze also reports that an above-average share of companies that missed revenue goals (39%) used disconnected solutions.

At least we all still agree that personalization is great, right?  This survey from Dynamic Yield confirms the point, but finds deployment is often lacking.  They found 67% of companies lack a unified audience strategy and may be using siloed processes within different teams (email marketing, for example). Forty percent lack KPIs to measure personalization success.

OpenAP, the adtech platform co-owned by the major broadcast networks, has launched Open Identity, to converge streaming identity data. Open Identity will match audience identities across publishers, advertisers and data providers to streamline targeting and measurement for the video eco-system. The aim is to reduce waste while boosting audience size and match rates.

Sprout Social has launched a new, AI-powered iteration of its Influencer Marketing platform. Users will be able to identify creators relevant to their needs by using natural language prompts. It will also provide AI-powered brand-fit scores for creators and brand-safety scores, based for example on whether creators have, in the past, praised competitors.

The CDP Institute is offering an enhanced version of its Use Case Generator which now includes a business value calculator. The fully automated system collects information about the use case. It then automatically provides a summary in a standardized use case format.

Marketing and customer data intelligence platform Validity has acquired email testing and optimization provider Litmus. Validity’s platform currently offers CRM data management as well as email address verification and deliverability services. The addition of Litmus will support end-to-end email marketing campaigns.

“Insufficient groveling” may not yet be a crime, but it does help to explain why proceedings commenced yesterday in the FTC’s lawsuit alleging Meta built an illegal monopoly through the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions. The trial has been a long time coming: the acquisitions each happened more than a decade ago and the case was filed in 2020. Mark Zuckerberg has begun testifying.

Speaking of monopolists, Google is unabashedly using AI Overviews to redirect users to Google search results. AI Overviews is increasing the number of links that it shares in its answers presented in summary format, but the links often go to Google search pages rather than other websites. Google says the links will appear when its systems determine they are “useful,” although they didn’t specify whether that’s useful to consumers or to Google.