CDP Institute

French publisher and author unions are bringing a lawsuit against Meta for copyright infringement based on allegations that it uses their content to train its AI models. Economic “parasitism” they’re calling it. This is the first case of its kind in France, although there is already similar legal action in the U.S.

There may have been a change of administration but the Trump Department of Justice is still calling for Google to sell its Chrome browser. The demand was repeated in a proposal signed by acting assistant attorney general Omeed Assefi. “Google’s conduct presents genuine danger to freedom in the marketplace and to robust competition in our economy,” the filing said.

Targeting based on social and demographic traits is firing arrows in the dark according to a new study from AdLook. Surveying over 1,000 online respondents, it turned out that 67% identified as “parents” didn’t have children, 76% tagged as married weren’t married and 50% of “women” were men. Brands should be targeting based on real interested and behaviors rather than outdated and inaccurate segments said AdLook.

Seventy-two percent of consumers are willing to work with AI agents as long as they can escalate to a human when necessary; indeed 59% would rather interact with a chatbot than wait for a live agent. Other key expectations in Five9’s 2025 Customer experience report relate to being met in the channel of choice — and that can vary with 56% saying it depends on the situation. Fully 86% are willing to use self-service before contacting support.

Redbrick has added newsletter advertising platform Paved to its portfolio of solutions that already includes email automation platform Delivra. Paved matches advertisers with newsletter subscribers across more than 3,000 publishers, helping the publishers monetize their newsletter lists. Paved creates enhanced targeting for advertisers while providing a more personalized newsletter experience for readers.

AI advertising really works according to a new report from Nielsen (an additional report from Smartly has 80% of marketers surveyed saying AI lives up to the hype). Google, using Nielsen Marketing Mix Modeling, found a 17% higher ROAS from AI-powered video campaigns on YouTube. Synergy too: Video Reach Campaigns together with Video View Campaigns (both AI-powered) delivered 23% higher sales effectiveness than Video Reach alone.

Even when they’re not being fed Russian propaganda disguised as news, eight major AI search engines are not reporting accurately according to a study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Where traditional search guides users to news websites, gen AI likes to parse and repackage the news. Ironically, premium chatbots were just much more confident about delivering bad information than their free counterparts.

Poe, a generative AI platform offering a choice of third-party LLMs, reports that image generation pioneer DALL-E has seen its usage share drop almost 80% as the number of models in the space has grown from three to around 25. Text usage across Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (ChatGPT) models has been nearly equal reflecting intense competition.

More than 40% of consumers trust AI search results more than paid search, while a striking 85% trust it more than search ads. Consumer research platform Attest reports that 68% of actual gen AI users trust information from chatbots and other AI tools (an impressive jump from 43% of consumers in general).

Consumers might have less trust in AI search if they read this Newsguard report, which shows Russian sources grooming ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and other models by providing them with genuine-looking web content packed with Russian propaganda. A propaganda network called Pravda created 3.6 million such articles in 2024 alone.

Is LinkedIn cracking down on companies that scrape member data in violation of its Terms of Service?  The company hasn’t said anything but two lead gen providers, Apollo.io and Seamless.ai, quietly vanished from the LinkedIn platform on the same day.  Both companies offered Chrome extensions that sales people could use to collect data from LinkedIn.

Composable CDP Hightouch continues to flesh out its identity resolution product.  The latest enhancement, called Golden Record, lets marketers set rules for picking the preferred identifier for each field in the customer profile.  It’s an old concept but not necessarily present in every identity management product.