CDP Institute

Step aside, retail media: the Next Big Ad Channel may be online games.  Google Immersive Ads is partnering with online game platform Roblox to grow opportunities like Rewarded Video ads. Immersive Ads are also being expanded across Google AdMob and Ad Manager.

President Trump was too busy starting a trade war yesterday to keep his promise of announcing a new owner for TikTok.  Amazon reportedly joined the clown car of bidders. What the Chaos Monkey does next is anyone’s guess, since neither law nor logic seem to apply.

Composable CDP GrowthLoop has launched a Compound Marketing Engine which deploys AI agents, built natively on a company’s data cloud, to compose audience segments, trigger omnichannel campaigns, measure performance and optimize. Although GrowthLoop describes this as a “fundamentally new approach” to marketing, there do seem to be a lot of marketing agents out there. Then again, GrowthLoop’s agents give marketers “superpowers,” so that’s special.

AI-powered search engine Perplexity is strengthening its position as an online shopping destination by integrating ecommerce system firmly.ai, which lets users complete a purchase without leaving the Perplexity platform. The firmly.ai API lets Perplexity connect with any ecommerce merchant while the merchant maintains “merchant of record” status.

Customer engagement platform (and CDP) Blueshift is the newest rider on the agentic AI band wagon. Their Customer AI Suite now includes Customer AI Agents, which generate, test, and continuously optimize variations on personalized messages.  The company says this allows 10x more experimentation than is possible by mere humans.

Can there be a band wagon traffic jam?  Offering data management and omnichannel engagement in the same system is another popular trend.  6Sense is joining the parade with Intelligent Workflows, which include Audience workflows that move B2B contacts into appropriate channels for engagement based on AI-powered insights into intent signals and buying stage, and Data workflows that append firmographic, technographic, and intent data to CRM and marketing automation systems.

An Adalytics report reveals that brands, including high profile brands like Disney, Hershey, Unilever, Procter & Gamble and Microsoft, are advertising to known bots — such as web crawlers. This raises concerns that verification providers such as DoubleVerify and IAS are more likely than previously thought to be serving ads to malicious bots too. Sources for AdExchanger said the known bots, appearing for example on IAB Tech Lab’s bot lists, should have been easily identified.

Marketing platform Zeta Global has announced the general availability of AI Agent Studio. Users will be able to activate prebuilt agents or create custom agents and link them to execute complex marketing tasks. Agentic Workflows, now in beta, will provide a portfolio of prebuilt and custom AI-powered workflows.

Researchers at Singapore Management University have proposed the use of a “lightweight domain-specific language,” AgentSpec, to force LLMs to operate within user-specified parameters. AgentSpec does not just identify risks but provides enforcement mechanisms. This comes as Anthropic provides deeper insight into genAI’s ability to evade guardrails.

Google will pay $100 million to settle a class action brought by pay-per-click advertisers. Overcharging accusations include counting clicks outside the advertisers’ geographic target area and failing to provide promised discounts. The settlement of this 2011 lawsuit will reimburse advertisers who used Google Ad Words between 2004 and 2012.