CDP Institute

ChatGPT is hoping to grab another slice of your attention with Pulse, a now-in-limited-preview feature that will proactively deliver daily updates on information it thinks you’ll find useful. The new service is positioned as a personal assistant that will select contents “based on your chats, feedback, and connected apps like your calendar.” Forget about privacy; the real question is whether this becomes a news source that gives ChatGPT the ability to shape your opinions.

TikTok already shapes user opinions, so you always knew it would be sold to Trump-friendly oligarchs at a steep discount from its true value. The next step is equally predictable: evolution into a right-wing propaganda outlet and pressure on advertisers to support it regardless. For models, check out YouTube welcoming back formerly banned accounts (which isn’t going as quickly as the rightists would like) and the FTC requiring Omnicom/IPG to buy media without considering “the veracity of news reporting or other politically or ideologically contested facts.”

The oligarch life is pretty sweet, except when it depends on other oligarchs. That largely explains why Microsoft is pulling away from its previous dependence on OpenAI. The latest move is addition of Anthropic AI models as an alternative to OpenAI models in Copilot Studio. The company had already moved to embed Anthropic AI within Office 365.

Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit charging it tricked customers into signing up for Amazon Prime and then made it difficult for them to quit. A jury trial in the suit had already begun. We can only assume that Amazon didn’t like its chances.

Like its Big Tech brethren, Microsoft is often attacked for training AI on published materials without paying the copyright owners. They’re considering a marketplace that would deflect the issue by compensating publishers when their materials are used. But don’t get too excited: so far the “Publisher Content Marketplace” is only a planned pilot program with no firm start date.

OpenAI has built its business on content it hasn’t paid for. But they’re apparently very interested in being paid for the content they generate, in the form of advertising. They are reported to be working on their own in-house ad infrastructure, presumably to avoid reliance on competitors like Google.

Brand safety and media measurement platform Integral Ad Science is being bought by private equity investor Novacap for $1.9 billion. It’s not the first PE rodeo for IAS, which was purchased by Vista Equity Partners in 2018 and went public in 2021. The company reported $530 million revenue in 2024 and is up 16% year-on-year in its latest quarterly report.

Click-based attribution never made much sense for anyone but it is especially irrelevant for B2B marketers with long, complex sales cycles. LinkedIn has launched a more meaningful alternative, Company Intelligence API, which reports aggregated company-level data on engagement across LinkedIn touchpoints. It is sold through analytics partners who can correlate engagement with ad impressions and sales results.

Here’s more progress on the ad measurement front: Acxiom is teaming with The Trade Desk to connect digital and CTV advertising audiences with online and offline sales. The connection is made using UID2 for The Trade Desk ad impressions and Acxiom’s Real ID for client conversion data. Matches are made at the individual level but remain anonymous through the miracle of Acxiom clean rooms.