CDP Institute

CDP Hightouch, in partnership with Databricks, is launching an AI-powered, self-service audience management platform for offsite retail media networks. It will enable retailers to build and activate AI-generated audiences across a range of media channels—including DSPs, CTV platforms, and walled gardens. The audience builder is warehouse-native.

In what might be a game-changer in the retail media space, Amazon is offering a Retail Ad Service to multi-brand retailers in the U.S. with ecommerce sites or apps. Essentially, this allows retailers to become their own retail media networks, delivering relevant ads to their shoppers across browse, search and product pages. You don’t even need to sell on Amazon to use it.

Coming out of NRF 2025, product announcements from SAP including a new solution for customer loyalty management. Features include connecting shopper profiles with a cloud-based loyalty wallet and unified loyalty data across multiple brands and regions. It will also add an AI shopping assistant to SAP Commerce Cloud.

Amazon advertisers can now measure results outside of Amazon stores using a new service from Stackline and Gigi. Gigi will enable unified audience buying for Amazon Marketing Cloud and Amazon DSP, which run ads in Amazon’s online stores and streaming TV channels such as Prime Video.  Stackline’s panel-based multi-retailer attribution will track customer behavior across Amazon, Walmart, Target, and other major online or in-store retailers.

Livestream auction platform Whatnot has raised $265 million in Series E funding at a nearly $5 billion valuation. Whatnot is seen as a competitor to TikTok Shop. It’s not just in the creator space that people will look for alternatives should TikTok be banned in the U.S.

For the first time, data vendor Experian is offering a marketplace for third-party data vendors. Initial participants include Attain, Circana, Dun & Bradstreet and Alliant. This follows Experian’s introduction of third-party onboarding last year shortly before Oracle exited that space.

Pioneering CDP Lytics has been purchased by composable digital experience platform Contentstack. Founded in 2013, Lytics has recently offered composable options, exposed its data to content management systems, and offered a free personalization option.  The deal will make it easier for Contentstack customers to access unified customer profiles.  (See this blog post for more analysis.)

Visual content giants Getty Images and Shutterstock have entered into an agreement to execute “a merger of equals.” Getty Images Holdings, as it will be known, will have a value of approximately $3.7 billion. The combined entity will be in a stronger position to deal with the disruptions caused by generative AI use of copyrighted content.

Open AI’s o1-preview beat established chess engine Stockfish by cheating. Without human prompting, o1-preview hacked the file system that controlled the game and rewrote the score in its favor. It’s not the first instance of deceptive behavior by an AI, but there’s no cause for alarm, right?

Meta has fully embraced its role as a right-wing propaganda outlet by loosening community guidelines and replacing third-party fact checkers with X-style community notes. “Too much censorship,” chirped Chairman Mark Zuckerberg.  X ad revenue fell by half after it adopted the community notes approach.

Apple has never been so blatantly irresponsible as Meta, but it also shows a limited concern for accuracy.  Rather than withdraw an AI product that generates wildly inaccurate news stories on the latest iPhones, it says it is trying to clarify the nature of the summaries.  Recent errors include reports that Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself and that tennis star Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.